


How the Bear Tormented the Hawk, Part 2

by Drunk_Scarran



Category: Deadpool - All Media Types, Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Animal Attack, Avengers Tower, Bears, Blood, Blood and Injury, Cages, Captivity, Comfort, Costumes, Deadpool Thought Boxes, Emergency Medical Technicians, Gen, Handcuffs, Hawk Clint Barton, Hawkguy, Hospitals, Hurt Clint, Hurt Clint Barton, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Marvel Comics - Freeform, Marvel Universe, Mild Blood, Mild Language, Needles, New York City, Protective Avengers, Protective Steve, Protective Steve Rogers, Rated for Deadpool's Language, Rescue Missions, Series, Stitches, Tacos, Teddy Bears, Torment, Whump, elk, goons - Freeform, h/c
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-02
Updated: 2015-03-17
Packaged: 2018-03-04 22:20:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 26,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3093230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Drunk_Scarran/pseuds/Drunk_Scarran
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I strongly suggest reading the first part first. If you'd rather not, there's a tiny sum up of the first part at the beginning of this one.</p><p>Just released from the hospital where a stupid series of mistakes sent him after his last mission, Clint Barton made a few lousy decisions that sent him straight to the Bear. Things seem to always go bad for the Hawk when the Bear is around.<br/>A simple tale of even worse luck, a madman's odd obsession, and more from our special guest.</p><p>(Basically: Poor Hawkeye is having a bad day and our favourite red-clad stalker is gleefully yet accidentally making it worse. It's meant to be harmless fun. And to include whumping.<br/>Part 2 of a series)</p><p>Finally completed! Thank you</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Crude summary from Part 1:
> 
> Hawkeye goes on a mission and stands guard on a dangerous perch. Deadpool goes to the same location for seemingly strange reasons, finds Hawkeye and, dressed as a bear, decides it would be great to scare Hawkeye to death.  
> By accident, Hawkeye misuses on Deadpool a new shockwave arrow Tony Stark forced him to bring along: the archer ends up thrown off a cliff.  
> The man crashes on the ground, tumbles into a river then loses consciousness; Deadpool decides to save him from drowning and revive him. He also decides to leave bear paw temporary tattoos and the words ''Deadpool is my Teddy Bear'' on Hawkeye just because he apparently developed some mysterious obsession with bears and with the archer.
> 
> Later, Hawkeye wakes up in the hospital, being treated for his injuries. Natasha and Tony are being dicks to him because of the whole bear paws thing and the fact he owed his life to none other than Deadpool.  
> Being associated with the crazy mercenary is bad for your Super Heroes credentials. 
> 
> Chances of lousy English ahead
> 
> edit: Guys, bears are a thing movie-wise: https://twitter.com/VancityReynolds/statuses/581485601674792960   
> https://twitter.com/VancityReynolds/status/581492198950060033

How the bear tormented the Hawk,  
PART 2

 

He had managed to convince Natasha to bring him a paper cup nearly half filled with hand sanitizer: there were distributors at every corner after all; nobody was going to miss it. For the alcohol it contains was the best product he could get at the moment in order to remove his bear paws temporary tattoos.  
It also worked wonders on permanent ink.

Clint was desperate to: he had been awake for a few hours only and every female nurse with special security clearance already knew about the marks and Deadpool’s message, thanks to a certain mister Stark. Some would come in his room with seemingly false pretences, and then leave hiding a smile: Clint knew he had charm, but given the situation, the reactions were way too suspicious to be all about flirting.  
Tony’s own bear puns weren’t as inconspicuous however, and, although Thor meant well, the archer couldn’t care less how noble the Midgard animal was, or how much of an opponent a Kodiak bear could be according to the documentaries Banner showed the Asgardian.

Once Natasha had handed him the sanitizer, he used it to slather then furiously rub at whatever artwork Deadpool left on his skin until it was all gone. To be honest, the man would have scrubbed his skin raw with sandpaper if need be; anything to put an end to a joke that was a long way from amusing anymore.

 

And with this major annoyance dealt with, Clint could focus on the next issue at hand: being discharged and getting the hell away from there.

Preferably before more S.H.I.E.L.D. envoys came to visit him and try to learn more about Deadpool than they did during the last few debriefs.  
Like the archer knew anything from their previous encounter, or could make any sense of the whole Ursidae obsession for all that mattered. 

Eventually, they released him from the upstate hospital with no further questions about his previous misfortune.  
By then, the events unravelled as they normally do: it wasn’t Clint’s first rodeo.  
It seemed like he was the human pincushion of the Avengers bunch, along with being unofficially voted most likely to be the bad guys’ punching bag. 

At least this time his mobility wasn’t reduced as it usually was when he would break a leg, and he didn’t have wounds to watch over and stiches to get removed as it is customary for when he would get shot, stabbed or hit by shrapnel.

 

It didn’t mean he was good as new quite yet: although his subluxed shoulder and elbow were healing well and the swelling had resorbed, his arm still felt sore, his movements were limited, and he had to wear a sling.  
His whole chest was bound with lighter wraps than it had been when he awoke at the hospital, yet his entire side still felt incredibly stiff from all the bruising, and his cracked rib was chronically acting up.  
And of course breathing hurt, which is why he was prescribed the typical painkillers when he was discharged. Again, the archer knew the drill.

 

Ever since a few months after moving in the Avengers Tower, there would be at least one team member present to assist in the process, then drive him back to the skyscraper they shared. Whenever the injured one of the day wasn’t admitted in the Tower very own infirmary, it was the kind of things they did for each others now.  
…Even if there were times where the duration of the ride back home would be spent bickering or silently sulking.

 

On this occasion though, it was a busy week for the superheroes: until early in the morning before Clint’s release, most of them were gone in separate missions or attending to personal matters far away. They were not exactly saving the world, yet they were helping, and all but Rogers were out of town that day.

Of course Steve volunteered to assist the injured man this time; he would have offered his help even if he had not been the only one available. However, Captain received a last minute call and had to fly and fast.  
The archer thought the all-American hero would die from the guilt when he came by his hospital room to give him the news. Clint had to swear he was alright frankly more than once only so Steve would stop giving him the kicked puppy look.  
He had to repeatedly claim Pepper could come later in the day, pick him up, and take care of the usual little details for Steve to finally leave for his assignment.

It wasn’t technically a lie since Pepper had offered to; only, she had been delayed by a meeting –so she told him on the phone– and wasn’t expected back in the country until much later. Much later as in: a long time after Clint would have been discharged, and the man had not been planning on hanging around the hospital until then.

The archer thought what Steve didn’t know could not hurt him anyhow.

 

An area coordinator from S.H.I.E.L.D offered Barton to have some agents escort him back to the Tower, but the injured man decided he had seen enough of Fury’s men for the month with all the debriefs and questioning he had been submitted to.  
Thus, he kindly declined and, once out of the building, he simply hailed a cab and climbed in with the sport bag Natasha had used earlier in the week to bring him a change of clothes.  
He didn’t give the Avengers Tower address, but rather asked to be dropped a few neighbourhoods away: the man had decided he needed the walk very badly after spending a few days nearly locked up in a single room. It would also prove to be a good first step toward getting back to his regular training routine, or so he believed.

Of course he regretted making this decision after a short while, or rather realised he should have asked to be driven a bit closer to the Tower: he had greatly overestimated his stamina in such physical condition.  
The drugs he had been given before being discharged had mostly worn off before he even walked a quarter of a mile in the busy Manhattan streets. A block further, his ribs were unpleasantly throbbing, causing him to take shallower inhalations and becoming almost out of breath by the time he reached half of his way to the Tower.  
Walking back by himself had been such a bad idea…

And he didn’t even have the prescription painkillers to relieve the discomfort: he had forgotten to go and get the pills at the drugstore located right next to the hospital he just left.  
Growing crankier by the minute, he sort of understood why the other Avengers more or less always wanted to babysit him.

Clint considered calling another cab, pride and exercise be damned.  
Or maybe even taking the bus, he thought as he was cutting through a narrow street of pawnshops, used electronics retailers, and shady jewellery stores.  
He didn’t think much of the small stretch of buildings at first, until he noticed the shops were all closed while the sun was still up. There were no car parked anywhere on this portion of the street, no one walking by, standing under a shop canopy, or sitting on some stairs.  
That wasn’t right, not for this part of the city at this time of the day.

 

As if right on time, a metal panel garage door on the front of an Import shop, located before the street crossed the next avenue, started to rise with disquieting squeaks.  
Out of the hole left in the storefront slowly but surely came an unmarked delivery truck: it backed out until it blocked the sidewalk with its nose and nearly did as well with its tail lift on the other side of the narrow street.

Well, if that wasn’t a trap of some kind, the archer had no idea what it was.  
But, aside from the obvious, he still had to figure out what the ambuscade was all about: were the perpetrators criminals, terrorists, or spies?  
This detail meant a lot; it could influence how smart his opponents would be, but mostly what they would do to him: whoever it was could rob him and beat him up, kill him on the spot, kidnap and ransom him, capture him and torture him, use him for some wicked high-tech brainwashing ploy, or much more he couldn’t phantom.

He couldn’t see the driver: still not a soul in sight, in fact, but the preparedness level of this new invisible threat meant nothing good.

 

Adrenaline started flowing through his veins as Barton considered his options: all he had were the shirt on his back and a change of clothe in the sport bag hanging from his good shoulder. He had no weapon so soon after being released from the hospital, and even if he did remove his sling, hand-to-hand combat might prove difficult in his condition.  
It went without saying that the ache in his ribs was making his chances of getting away unscathed even dimmer.

 

And it was on such grim yet truthful considerations that the events unfolded in a way the agent would have never suspected they would: the truck door on the driver side opened and an infamous figure jumped out to land on the pavement less than 40 feet away from Clint.

“No way…” he whispered in utter disbelief.

For the newcomer was wearing a too familiar bear fur over a just as familiar red and black suit. 

“Adding this time to the ensemble a beautiful handcrafted Iroquois hunting spear and a metal head tomahawk reproduction!” Deadpool professed out loud with pride, as the man was in fact Wade Wilson in the flesh.  
“But don’t let it fool you: these babies are still sharp as sharp can be!”

 

The archer went from complete shock to a confused mixture of incredulity and fury in a matter of seconds:  
“YOU?! You gotta be *kidding me*!!”

“I missed you too, brother bear!” The mercenary chuckled, extending his arms as if he could hug the other man from where he stood.

More focused on being livid now, the Avenger pointed an accusing finger at the madman: “How the Hell did you find me anyway? You had me tailed?... Don’t tell me you are *stalking* me ever since!” 

“Me? No! I’m not *that* loony! It’s not like I checked up on you or anything!... Though right now I might have followed your thought bubbles just a little bit. When they’re high up; they’re very easy to spot…” Deadpool waived his unarmed hand dismissively:  
“And someone has to say it anyway: cheer up, buddy; that was such a gloomy read! No wonder this stroll back to the Tower is like the Avengers version of the Walk of Shame!”

“Wh…” Clint never finished his sentence.  
He tried very hard to be above it all: the second he recognized him, he started to mentally prepare himself to expect the most irrational tales from the madman and willed himself to ignore them.  
But the mercenary’s inane answers were stronger nevertheless; it had Clint thrown into a speechless confusion for a short moment.

In an attempt to recover, the archer briefly allowed some deep-rooted defense mechanism to take over as he sneered back sardonically:  
“My thoughts are a gloomy read? So you’re a telepath now, uh? I guess you’re still a bit rusty and can’t read minds at all time just yet. Here, let me spell out loud what I'm thinking right now: *Screw. Off.* I want nothing to do with you.”

“Oh, you. You don’t even mean it.” Deadpool admonished on a paternalistic tone, taking a few steps toward the archer.

Tensing, empty threats be damned, Clint’s voice turned to a poisonous hiss: “You come any closer and I’ll rip your head clean off.”

At this point, it didn’t matter for Barton that the other man saved him from drowning, or that Tony Stark –along with his very own carelessness– had played major roles in his previous misfortune.  
His patience was growing thin, adrenaline was still coursing through his veins, it ached to breath, and his entire day had been more exhausting than he expected it to be. Clint was bound to be pissed.

Deadpool stopped in his track and pouted: “You know I can grow my head back. I’m not a zombie; my brain is not my weakness! Heh, it’s even far from being my weakness!”

“Then I will throw it in the sewers and call Fury: he’ll have well enough time to send the men in white for you while you are busy growing your empty head back.” Hawkeye was trying to can his emotions.  
He allowed himself to show irritation thought; not that he could hide it anyway whenever Deadpool was concerned. But he knew getting furious would only encourage the nutjob further: it would act like a bleeding wound in a tank filled with piranhas.

“Wait, why would you have me sent to the funny farm?” the mercenary truly sounded hurt.

“You made me fall off a cliff for a starter, is that a good enough reason?”

“That’s the issue?” The mercenary said in disbelief.

“I think it’s a big issue in itself… Unless you want to consider the fact you like to violate unconscious men?”

Deadpool shook his head adamantly: “No, no, no! That is *so* not the issue, the issue is: how could you?!” 

“How could I fall off? Gravity, that’s how.” The archer snarked.

“How could you do this to me?! You removed my bear paw tattoos! You’ve been redeemed and saved by the Spirit of the Bear!, You should honour it and bear its mark with pride, not erase it from existence!...”  
The mercenary came a bit nearer and suddenly switched to a lighter mood: “Get it? *Bear* its mark?... *Bear*…”

Clint didn’t miss the distraction attempt:  
“Oh no, you’re not getting any closer you maniac!” he warned as he took a few steps back.

“Aw! We were making progress! It’s for your own good, you know that.”

The Avenger scoffed at the bear-enthusiast’s moaning, but he regretted it immediately as the motion jarred his already increasingly aching ribs, causing a spike of stabbing pain in his chest and side.

His vision might have grayed a little and for all he knew, he may had lost track of time for a second or two: when his focus was back on the red clad man, the later was a few feet closer.  
Clint had no recollection of actually witnessing these steps: he gritted his teeth, cursing himself for letting his guard down.

Once again, maybe the short walk in the neighbourhood wasn’t such a great idea after all.

 

“I would make a great shrink, you have to admit.” The madman pondered out loud.

Clint wasn’t sure if the conversation remained on the same track during his short hypotension induced haze, or if it had diverged to something else in the meantime, but to brush over his moment of confusion and keep appearances, he went along with the flow and criticised:  
“You and I have a very different definition of *great*…” 

“I am great.”

“That’s open for debate.”

“Seriously though! And you just wait to see what I have all planned out for us: it’s going to be amaaazing!” Deadpool singsonged with enthusiasm.

“Oh I don’t plan on waiting for anything…” Clint stubbornly stated in reply, turning on his heel and about to walk away.

“But you must.” The mercenary was back to his calm and patronizing tone.

The archer felt a shiver down his spine.  
To be honest, Clint had to admit the surprising change in the mercenary’s attitude made the three simple words sound awfully like something a psychopathic serial killer would say right before clubbing his future victim over the head.  
Hawkeye suddenly bitterly regretted turning his back on a cracked person. He might have tried to making a point in showing Deadpool’s absurdities didn’t not affect him, but the Avenger still felt like he gravely misjudged a situation, *again*…  
As in: he may have pushed the audacity a bit too far and could pay for it any second now.

 

One way or another, Clint Barton had barely taken a few steps away from the bear enthusiast when he heard a loud whistling coming from behind: the mercenary was signalling for something.  
This looked bad.

Coming to a prompt halt, Hawkeye started to glance over his shoulder at the madman, but additional noises quickly caught his attention: this time, it came from the side of the street he was heading toward.

A second unmarked delivery truck came from the avenue the archer had left minutes before and made a sharp turn in the street, mirroring the first truck’s position across the road.  
It efficiently blocked Clint’s envisioned way out: a trap had indeed been set and, this time, there was no doubt he had fallen straight into it.

And somehow, the man wondered if being cornered by members of a terrorist organisation keen on torturing captured agents wouldn’t have been better than being cornered by a loose cannon like the red-clad mercenary.

 

A quartet of burly men slipped out of the second truck and a peculiar feature they had in common did nothing to prevent Clint from seeing red again: not only had Deadpool brought beefy thugs with him to entrap him –and possibly beat him up– but he had them put on the same kind of matching bear pelt cowls as well.

The archer faced back the insane mastermind behind this equally insane ploy and hissed at him:  
“What do you want?! What is *this*?!”

Deadpool didn’t even register the virulence of the other man’s tone:  
“What is what? The bear thing? It’s a new thing, it’s a fun thing: we’re doing themes now!”

“No, not the… bear thing… Wait, seriously?”

The mercenary nodded: “Like Catwoman and her Legion of the Feline Furies: matching costumes, themed fighting styles, cat-gadgets, lame puns… the whole deal!”

“Okay… Okay, I don’t want to know…” Clint pinched the bridge of his nose; the headache from his healing concussion seemingly joining the party.  
He let out a strained sigh before asking more gravely: “Will you really try to stop me from leaving?”

“No, not really, but then again you’re not even supposed to *want* to leave.”

“And why not?”

“Because I’m offering you to join my Bear Clan, which is the coolest clan ever!”

“…What?!”

Deadpool ignored Barton’s bewilderment: “Granted you’re already kinda like a hawk, I know, but Spirit animals are not exclusive: you could totally be a Hawk-Bear!”

“Hawk-Bear.” Clint parroted, once more inadvertently floored by the absurdity of the situation.

“I guess it’s a flying bear” Deadpool elusively motioned his spear at the sky: “I haven’t written down every little detail in our sacred Clan charter just yet, but doesn’t this make it even more dangerous? I mean: just when you think you’ve escaped the Hawk-Bear, it flies at your face and claws your jaw off!”

 

This portion of the street serving as a trap became silent for a short moment before the archer spoke again.

“That’s crazy.” Clint flatly said.

“What is, flying bears?”

“EVERYTHING!” To punctuate his words, the archer threw his gym bag on the ground with frustration: “You stalked me, you took over an entire street, you somehow bullied whoever had a shop here into closing it for this very moment, you brought trucks, you hired mean-looking beefy pals: and all of this for what?! Only to send me a club invitation?!... And what about that one time in the forest: was having me jump off a cliff supposed to be part of your invite?”  
Clint laughed a joyless laugh –that pulled at his ribs– before keeping on: “I have absolutely no clue how you’d think this could convince anyone to join a stupid gang! Did you really expect that, after all this, I’d willingly start following you around while wearing a rug?!”

Deadpool suddenly looked dejected, even with a mask hiding all of his features:  
“Aw. But I *did*. I thought it would work.”

“You’re crazy…” the archer scoffed.

“Not really. Or maybe… But you can’t deny my tactician talents: I’m a genius. I have plans, great plans! I even started working on an alliance with the Wolverine Clan! Although Wolvie has no recruit yet as we speak, it’s like he’s not even trying…”

“Does he even know you’re trying to sign him up for your little games?”

“It’s a work in progress…”

“Are you going to ambush him too?”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Is-it why you need me; I’ll be bait while you try to catch him in a net or something?” Clint derided.

“I said I’ll think about it!”

“That’s encouraging.”

“Alright, maybe not as bait, but it’s more in the line of what you can *do* instead of how much of a cannon fodder you can *be*. Imagine if we come to fight with spears and axes: the Bear Clan would be so much more advantaged with an archer on our side. Plus: bonus points for authenticity!”

At this point, Barton was more exasperated than anything: “It’s not the first time you try to recruit me, and the temporary team-ups might have given you the wrong idea, but there’s not a single chance that I’m going to join your Care Bear Boys Band.”

“Whaaat? Aw come on! Is-it the costumes? It’s the costumes, uh? Not purple enough for you? You do know bears are not purple, right?”

“Oh yeah, that’s exactly why…” Clint’s sarcasms were heavy.

And the agent had decided by then he had enough of this second onslaught of insanities and was going to leave Deadpool to it. He might have been stopped the previous time he tried to walk out of the trap, but that didn’t matter to him anymore.  
He swiftly looked at one of the blockades, then at the other, and picked the mercenary’s side of the street: the agent would rather brush pass a nutjob than four of his goons. Not that he underestimated the mercenary, but the numbers seemed more on his side this way.

Plus the delivery truck Deadpool came in was parked in a way that left about 3 or 4 feet between its tail and the wall while the thugs’ truck was leaving not enough space to squeeze through: even if Clint did want to backtrack out of the trap, he would be physically blocked.  
Climbing on the nose of the vehicle or crawling under it weren’t options either with his healing injuries, and he somehow doubted the thugs were agreeable enough to simply move the truck out of the way.

 

So Clint stiffly bent down and grabbed his sport bag with his good hand, supressing a hiss of pain as his ribs felt like he was being stabbed. He then started walking as calmly and confidently as he could toward the possible exit behind Deadpool’s truck, picking a trajectory that would keep him out of the mercenary’s reach without making it obvious he was trying to avoid the later.

“But we can fix this if it’s only a matter of colour” the mercenary told Clint as he was nearing him: “We can add purple just for you; we can claim you’re that one Hawk-Bear that went heavy on wild blackberries and stained its fur. With artistic licence, we can make it anything between Mauveine, Red-Violet or even Byzantium.”

“Not working.” Clint flatly retorted as he reached the madman’s level.

“Alright alright, *maybe* we’ll allow you to dodge the uniform, but we’ll have to discuss it at the next Clan meeting first. We have rules so you know.”

“Still not convinced” the archer stated as he passed Deadpool without even looking at him.

After a adding few more feet between the mercenary and him, he heard the madman shouting melodramatically: “DON’T WALK AWAY FROM ME!”

But Barton didn’t even bother acknowledging the little scene and kept walking toward the truck.

Part of him hoped the bear enthusiast wasn’t going to change his mind at his display of insolence and forcefully have him join his club. Yet the rest of him didn’t give a damn about prudence anymore and only wanted to pop a few prescription pills left from previous misfortunes and sleep the rest of the day in peace in his very own bed.  
Of course he was going to jump in a cab as soon as he would leave the damned deserted street, and this time he’d have the taxi drop him right at the door of the Stark Tower, but until then, he still had to keep his cool and stroll out of the trap first.

 

The Avenger finally reached the gap between the vehicle and the brick wall –up close, it was narrower than he first believed– and entered it. He immediately noticed the back of the truck was wide open and the seemingly empty cargo box was cast in shadow.

Clint was wondering if Deadpool had planned on shoving him into the back of this one truck had he not somehow escaped the madman when he heard muffled noises coming from the said empty space.  
Something was moving, and there was the sound of metal scraping against metal…

Chains slithering on the flooring of the cargo box maybe?

 

His own less superhuman spider-sense barely had time to tingle: first thing Clint knew, a dark mass flew out of the shadow and leaped straight at him with a ferocious growl.  
A paw nearly as big as his head with claws as long as his fingers batted at him with frightening power.

His reflexes might be honed, but his healing injuries slowed him down and the narrow space limited his movements: the archer did twist and jump back to avoid the deadly attack, but he was less than an inch short from completely evading the claw swipe. 

He heard and felt the fabric of his shirt rip, and pain erupted on his chest as the claws slashed across his sternum. He stumbled and immediately hit the wall right behind him, unable to back away further.  
But this all seemed so distant to him and he was far too shaken to even make a sound. His whole world was now focused on the massive drooling jaws filled with sharp teeth that opened to let out a thunderous growl right before him.

It was a bear. A goddamn grizzly.  
A real live one.

And even though it seemed chained to something that kept it from entirely springing out of the truck, the beast was way too close for comfort.

In fact, Clint wasn’t clear of the animal’s reach.

 

He did try to push away from the wall and propel himself as far from the truck and the rabid animal as possible, but there wasn’t enough room and the bear was faster.  
The beast swiped again, this time its paw aimed lower.

It tore directly into Barton’s left thigh, straight above the knee. And although a smaller surface of his skin was slashed across, the claws dug deeper into his flesh than they did on his chest.

Searing pain flooded his entire leg, beating by far the ache in his ribs and his shoulder the motion awoked. In a strangled yelp, the archer jerked and partially crumbled as his leg immediately gave under his own weight.  
He crashed ungracefully to the ground like a puppet with half of its strings abruptly cut off; tangled in his sling and his bag, but mostly overwhelmed by the burning agony of the ragged holes that punctured his skin and muscles.

 

His survival instincts and the debilitating pain tangled as well: he wanted to run away as far and as fast as he could, but his mangled leg wouldn’t even let him stand. So he tripped, pushed, scrambled, fought with his sling, dragged his useless leg, and he even tried to move on his one free hand and his able leg in an uncoordinated and painful crawl.

He wasn’t thinking anymore, everything was frenzy and horror: he could still hear the rattle of the chains, and the loud angry growls of the beast; he had to get away. He knew he wouldn’t survive a third attack.  
There were voices too, people shouting, but he didn’t listen.  
Every movement jarred his leg, every attempt at stumbling forward had him wish he could just curl up and never move again.

His pulse was racing, the skin of his wounded leg felt warm.  
He was bleeding.

He was bleeding badly, but he finally managed to clear the space between the back of the truck and the wall. It had taken less than a minute to move about six feet out of the way, and yet it felt hours and yards more.

 

Clint more or less slouched against the wall where he at last crumbled again, wide eyed and breathless. His throbbing leg was awkwardly stretched before him, the pain signals so overwhelming he couldn’t remember any of these first aid basics field agents are virtually reprogrammed to know.

All he could think of was that simple: Deadpool had a bear.  
An actual bear.  
Deadpool had the bear chained into a truck before driving around downtown Manhattan looking for the archer.

 

…Where did Deadpool even get the bear?

This was so unreal, and yet Clint couldn’t tell if that even surprised him or not at this point. He wasn’t even sure why Deadpool’s pet ownership suddenly mattered more than having Nature’s killing machine right beside him and bleeding out in the street.  
It could have been that he was plain freaking out. Maybe a little, but who wouldn’t after getting lunged at and almost minced by over 700 pounds of muscles, teeth and gigantic claws.  
The idea itself was making him light-headed… 

 

A muscle spasm raked through his injured limb, the agony pulling him away from his dissipated thoughts. He threw his head back and grunted between clenched teeth, his able hand shooting for his mangled thigh and grasping tightly above the bleeding tears.

And the stabbing pain had been like a slap to the face: he realised he had wasted his precious adrenaline rush in an uncontrolled panic, and now the adrenal crash and the emotional shock were starting to do a number on his reasoning abilities.  
Blood loss would follow soon, and if he waited until shock settled in, it would be too late to do any thinking.

 

So he had to stop the bleeding.  
He had to get away from Deadpool and his bears, of course, but he had to make sure he wasn’t haemorrhaging to death first.

He had to get his breathing under control to supply as much oxygen as possible to his body, and had to try and slow his pulse down so he wouldn’t bleed out too fast.  
However, with his injured ribs turning the act of breathing into a nightmare and the way the sound of a grizzly six feet away fiercely fighting its chain had his heart wildly racing, it wasn’t an easy task.

Having an idea and needing the extra mobility and fast, Hawkeye unhooked the sling from his shoulder and carefully released his healing arm. Painstakingly, his battered elbow and shoulder not helping a bit, he managed to fold the piece of fabric of the sling and form a makeshift bandage he pressed on his ragged wounds.  
It wasn’t the time and place to think about using something sterile, nor did he have the luxury of constantly carrying around germ-free bandages on him.

With the strap of the sling, he wrapped it around his thigh as tight as he could, but his injured arm lacked the strength, the reach, and the motor function to make the crude compression bandage as efficient as it could have been.  
It wasn’t going to stop the bleeding, but hopefully it would slow it down a little and buy him just enough time to crawl out of the pawnshop street.  
Clint did not allow himself to doubt he could make it so far.

 

He was struggling to tie a knot when he was all of a sudden reminded he wasn’t alone in the universe, but rather absorbed in his own personal haze. The sound of hurried footsteps breached the walls of his bubble, and he recognized Deadpool’s voice shouting at someone else:

“Which one of you took care of securing our bear?!... You put too much chain! Look what you’ve done! You did this! THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!!”

The archer dared looking at where the bear still thrashed around: the cargo box of the truck –rocking under the grizzly’s weight– blocked his view of the trap and the people that had set it.

The mercenary suddenly popped into view the other side of the narrow space Clint had the misfortune of passing through, although keeping his distance from the wild beast.  
He was holding what the Avenger identified as a tranquiliser gun for big games.

“Hey, you’re alive!” Deadpool mused, sounding surprised “We weren’t sure anymore, with the scream and the noise and the silence and all… I think it’s a sign: the Great Bear spared your life!”

How the archer wanted to turn off his hearing aids at this very moment.  
Or better: how he wanted the grizzly to turn onto his number one fan and shred him to pieces.

As if he had read Barton’s mind and wasn’t planning on pushing his communion with bears this far, Deadpool aimed his weapon at the animal and shot it with a few darts.

 

The archer decided he wasn’t going to stick around and wait for the sedative to start working, nor did he desire to go for a second round of pointless arguments with the madman while one of his limbs was oozing blood.  
With sufficient efforts to bring sweat to his brow, Clint struggled up on one leg, the storefront behind him supporting nearly all his weight. While Deadpool was busy with his furry friend, the injured man half stumbled half slammed into the wall with each pitiful hop away from the truck, his injured leg a mass of burning pain every little movement awoke.  
Dragging it on the ground hurt, but it wasn’t like he could hold it up either by the location of the gashes.

 

“Wait! Hold on!”  
It was Deadpool calling him; the grizzly wasn’t distracting him and blocking his way to Clint anymore.

The archer didn’t stop or pondered on the fact he was still far from the avenue, somewhat afraid he wouldn’t be able to keep moving if he did. He clenched his teeth and tried ignoring the mercenary, pressing on with his agonising one-legged hops forward.

“Don’t go just yet, don’t let this ruin everything! You’re still okay, aren’t you? Those are just flesh wounds! We have tons of things to do; we can still do them, right? Don’t be like that, don’t leave! You see what happens when you try to turn us off?” Deadpool jabbered on as he caught up on the Avenger in a slow jog.

This time Clint couldn’t stay mute: he poured all of his resentment in his tone as he spat back an eloquent: “Get stuffed!!”

“Aaawww! *Get stuffed* you said it!” Surprisingly, Deadpool sounded touched now: “This is just like in my mental scenarios! *Get stuffed, Teddy Bear!*... Get it? Stuffed… Teddy… Stuffed...”

But before Clint could even comprehend what the madman was even referring to, he heard a weapon discharge and felt a sharp sting on one of his pectorals.

He had to look up at Deadpool’s tranq gun then down at the dart sticking out of his chest a few times before the realisation of what just took place really hit him. His limbs were already tingling and becoming numb.  
Soon, he couldn’t tell how his own limbs where resting in space.

The world seemed to be gradually tilting on one side and everything turned into splotches of fading colours. 

“You son of a bitch…” A dazed Hawkeye slurred before collapsing in a heap.

 

With human being, the strong sedatives acted swiftly. 

 

To be continued…


	2. Chapter 2

Something vicious pulled him out of the darkness, this time considerably more harshly than it had been the time he woke up at an upstate hospital. The archer was left confused by the abruptness to the point it took a second wave of this acute discomfort for him to identify it in the first place.  
It was a combination of a sharp nausea and an Excedrin headache, with a generous dose of wooziness. Even by lying still flat on his back with his eyes closed, he had the impression his body was swaying or erratically accelerated and decelerated in no particular direction. He wasn’t incredibly hung-over; this was all beyond such state.  
He felt wrong, very wrong.

He was going to be sick.  
He tried to roll on his side but couldn’t: something was holding his arms above his head. The urgency of his situation didn’t let him ponder on this detail.  
Out of options, he settled on turning his head toward the ground the best he could before his stomach started to violently contract.

Nothing came up and the man found himself miserably dry heaving for what felt like an eternity, a motion that awoke all matters of pain in his body and brought tears to his eyes.  
Shoulder, back, ribs, leg, head, ribs again, brain once more, and that leg that just burned and throbbed…

 

But feeling sick was an ailment much stronger at the moment.

The archer wasn’t the kind to retch for no good reason; he also knew he had been sick previously to the point he couldn’t spit out but a small amount of saliva no matter how much his stomach cramped. And now that he thought of it, he could discern the typical foul bile taste the dryness of his mouth concealed at first.  
Some sedatives can cause such symptoms, both of them: he had been drugged.  
And not good drugs made to make you feel better; the kind designed to knock you off your feet and fast no matter the consequences.

He then remembered the sting of the tranquilizer dart.  
That elicited a miserable groan out of the man.

He allowed the other pains to wash over him once more: his ribs were aching again, the headache wasn’t leaving either, and he felt more clearly a dull pain deep in one of his thighs, throbbing with each heartbeat yet somehow numbed by something pressing hard into his flesh.  
Somehow, in his haze, the agent was back to feeling more concerned about this queasiness that was taking way too long to subside. He had not seen any trace of his own vomit on the ground beside him, and when he opened heavy eyelids to inspect his own torso, the only body fluid soiling his shirt was the now dried blood of the gashes bear claws drew on his chest some time earlier.

His clouded mind saw this as a small relief: in all of his current sufferings and the memories of previous humiliations, he at least kept the dignity of not drowning and/or bathing in his own puke this time.

He was convinced he had been in fact sick, but seeing no evidence of it and doubting somebody took the time to clean up only to leave him lying flat on the cold hard ground, he theorized he had been moved to a different location from where he had allegedly been puking his guts out while still unconscious. 

Not daring to move his aching head once more, his cheek pressed on one of his arm, he pushed the whole queasiness issue on the back burner of his mind in hope it would help recover from it, then carefully scanned his surroundings with weary mildly unfocused eyes.

He was resting on cold damp cracked cement slabs; he could feel it through his thin t-shirt.  
Close by, he could distinguish what looked like a strange squat concrete building with a plain metal hatch pierced in the middle of the wall. The architecture was incredibly simple, without any particular style; the front stained with rust and mould. On the concrete floor before it an imperceptible crease created a pretty unappealing puddle of still rainwater, and vegetation was growing through fissures in the slabs.

 

Clint’s foggy brain came to the conclusion the place was abandoned, but he was mildly surprised there was neither graffiti nor broken beer bottle in sight.  
Nobody was coming either.

His leg pulsated with pain, but he could not see it clearly from his position.  
Planning to eventually lift his heavy head and take a look as soon as his latest renewed attack of nausea would stop, he started with simply facing back what he assumed was up. 

Above him, not a skyscraper in sight. The sky was still very blue, although it was oddly striped with blurry black streaks lined up perfectly.   
He felt a slight breeze that had him shiver. 

It was perfectly silent aside from birds singing on apparently every tree in the area and the sound of what could be cars on a freeway far away.   
There seemed to be white noise interfering with the actual echoes of his surroundings, but the man suspected it had something to do with whatever poison was still flowing through his body. 

He remembered Deadpool and his costumed goons, and he wondered if they simply dumped his poor self in a street somewhere then left.  
Though he dropped the theory considering what little he could see from his location looked nothing like the City.

 

It took him way too long to figure the dark lines that streaked the blue of the sky were actually thick metal bars. It took him slightly less time to realise it meant he was in some sort of cage set outside; high and large enough for him to get up and pace if he could, yet still a cage. 

This was uncanny, but mostly very alarming.

 

Pushing the various pains and discomforts to the back of his mind again, he tried to struggle into a sitting position but quickly understood why he couldn’t roll on his side earlier on: his hands were secured to the bars of the cage.

Probably dropped down on his back while he was still unconscious, each arm had been brought up above his head, stretched –this was uncomfortable for his healing shoulder- and separately handcuffed to different bars. He could slide the cuffs up and down the bars, but his range of motion was nonetheless very limited horizontally.  
Even if he had something to work on the locks, his hands were too far apart to be able to use any makeshift lock picking tool efficiently.

Frustrated and yet on the verge of being somewhat upset, the man pulled hard on the cuffs and shook them for good measure, looking for a sign or a sound that would point to any weakness in the short chains.   
There was none, and he only managed to probably bruise his wrists.

As for the cage to which he was secured to, lack of maintenance had the dark paint flaking off the wrought iron, but under the cracked coat and the superficial rust, the bars still seemed sturdy. The enclosure had obviously been built to hold something large and strong, no matter how many decades ago it was.

Irked, the archer tried moving his legs to reposition himself; however the dulled ache suddenly spiked to a sharp piercing pain engulfing most of his lower left thigh. He gasped and froze; his vision greying at the edge, his mind going blank.

 

Clint didn’t know how much time passed before he managed to ride the wave of pain and risk a look at his mangled limb. He remembered the agony having been worse, and the pressure he now felt around it along with the tingling in the rest of his leg were new: he quickly understood why when he realised his crude pressure bandage had been remade noticeably tighter.  
That explained the sensations he could now place: blood flow to his leg had been diminished in an attempt to stop him from bleeding out. 

Speaking of which, there was blood on the ground, more or less smudged, a little less so pooling on the spot.  
The fabric of the simple fatigue pants Natasha had brought him, although too dark to show the red of the liquid saturating it, was soaked in clammy lukewarm or drying blood, sticking unpleasantly to half of his left leg. From large rips in the leg of the pant, he could see his own crimson-stained skin. The makeshift bandage tied over the tears and the fabric was considerably more obviously bloodied. 

He felt woozy; maybe from the loss of fluids, maybe from the potent tranquilizer.  
Undoubtedly from both.

 

It could have been way worse, or so Clint thought as memories of how the gashes oozed blood before bandaging them came to him. It could have been if someone had not retightened the binding he failed to tie correctly earlier on.

 

Did Deadpool do this? Had he been aided by the psychotic maniac again?

 

The archer sulkily chased the thought out of his mind and, slightly jittery from his predicament –could anyone doubt he hated being shackled up and vulnerable?– he went to shift his uninjured right leg.

He stopped and hissed this time: his found out the hard way his able limb was tied at the ankle to his hurt one with nylon rope. He could not move the first without painfully jarring the later.  
This was nearly as efficient as if he had his ankles handcuffed to bars as well.

 

But he could not possibly remain there without trying anything: with his mind made a little clearer by the aches and the direness of his situation, Clint carefully and painfully pulled himself to a half sitting position before scanning his surrounding once again.

 

He could detail his empty cage better, along with the concrete building that seemingly made the entrance to his enclosure. Past the wrought iron bars; he could see similar or more spacious cages set in a grid pattern, separated by what must have been large gravel paths before various weeds took over.

The agent could only reach a single conclusion: Deadpool had locked him up in a cage in a closed-down and decrepit old zoo.

By the look of it, it wasn’t in any of the 5 zoos of New York City, and it could only be one outside the city limits.  
After all, and he would never admit it to the other Avengers –aside from Thor perhaps- Clint knew these 5 zoos. He had secretly visited every one of them not long after he first settled in New York for reasons he himself had trouble comprehending.  
He just felt like visiting zoos and seeing the animals. You could be in the middle of a noisy and obnoxious crowd, and yet still feel at peace.  
Nobody would ever look for you there.

 

The archer inaudibly swore between clenched teeth and extirpated himself from these digressing thoughts. He had to concentrate on his situation, on being locked up in a derelict cage with his arms tied to it.  
This was perplexing, and yet this made so much sense: only the red-clad mercenary would go through so much trouble for so little results.  
The City was filled with great spots to string up and hide victims, and yet Deadpool had to drag him this far.  
Wherever *this* was.

Although the mercenary had shown he possessed the right vehicles to transport injured bodies through town without attracting too much attention, and there were chances the madman was devoted enough to his stupid bear theme to use an abandoned zoo as his secret lair.  
There had to be a former bear enclosure somewhere in the area, if he wasn’t already secured in it.

The idea brought painful flashes of Deadpool’s crazy captive grizzly, something which somewhat raised Clint’s anxiety level: what if the mercenary was going to release the wild beast into the cage in which he was locked in at the very moment?  
Would the Canadian really go this far?

He gulped with difficulty then cleared his throat, intending to call for someone or for help, but it felt so parched he almost choked in the process.  
He made additional attempts until he was confident enough his voice would be above a hoarse whisper this time, and then rasped out loud:

“Hey! Anybody home?”

Clint waited, listening to the same silence that greeted him as he awoke in his cell. He licked dry lips, pulled himself up a tad more to a sitting position, and then, suspecting the man had to be nearby, called the mercenary again:

“I thought you said you wouldn’t keep me from leaving! What happened, you changed your mind?!”

Still no answer but the odd echo of his croaking on the damp concrete wall. 

“Deadpool! I swear to God if you abandoned me in a goddamn stinky cage in the middle of nowhere…”

The aborted threat apparently fell on deaf ears.  
Clint waited again; more apprehensive as the silence and his still slightly groggy mind worked in pair to suggest him to most ominous possible scenarios.

He wasn’t even sure Deadpool was around anymore: maybe the man ran away under the influence of god knows which new delirium, leaving Clint to slowly waste away in his cage or develop a deadly pneumonia during the cold humid night that was probably to come.  
But his end could also come earlier and faster, thus the man called out loud with a touch of uneasiness badly veiled in his tone:

“You better not be sending your stupid bear in to feed on me, you son of a bitch!!..."

Silence.

"Hey!... At least give me a chance to fight it back if you do!”

Silence again.

 

Just as the archer was about to groan if not roar in frustration, the clanking of metal on metal resonated from the concrete wall of the cage. The solid door slammed open on figures casted in shadows, but the delighted voiced that boomed from the opening could not be mistaken with anyone else’s:

“Feed you to my bear?! Abandon you?! Why would I ever do that! I’d never turn my back on my brother bear!” Deadpool exclaimed as he popped his head in through the opened hatch, still wearing his fur cowl. “The spiritual link is even stronger now! It is destiny, it’s all meant to be!”

The Avenger instantly tensed, frustration overtaking him again: the sight of the madman seemingly triggering such new reflex.

He was about to snap back at the mercenary when a person was forcefully pushed through the door and inside his run-down cage; the new presence enough to shut the archer up and alarm him at the very instant it stumbled in.

It was a short stout man sporting a dark beard, a slightly receding hairline coiffed rockabilly style, and thick-rimmed glasses; probably in his early 20’s nevertheless, showing up with a tweed coat over a flannel shirt and close-fitting belted pants.   
On a regular day, Clint would have not thought much of the man, but in this particular situation, it was an extreme case of *one of these things is not like the others*: the archer would have expected a wild beast or a thug dressed as one to join him, not what seemed to be a frightened coffee shop dweller. 

And frightened that newcomer was indeed, but Clint quickly caught additional details that told their own tales: the younger man had his hands tied up before him, part of what had thrown him off balance when he was forced in.

A courier bag rested on the newcomer’s stomach, the strap across his chest and over his biceps as if someone had forced him to shoulder it only after securing his hands.

Clint watched the younger man in wary confusion from his spot on the damp ground, but the younger man only had eyes for Clint’s shredded pant legs, bloodied bandage, and almost equally shredded thigh.

 

The bearded man’s lower lip quivered briefly before he pierced the veil of silence that had fallen in the cage, his voice breaking and fearful yet barely above a whisper:

“Wha… what are you going to do with me? You’re going to… are you going to torture me too?!.. I don’t know anything, I swear!”  
The newcomer was clearly addressing the mercenary.

Clint couldn’t speak: he was to some extent taken aback by the other guy’s terror, but he mostly dreaded Deadpool’s answer.

 

Though the later clearly wasn’t in a similarly gloom mood: the mercenary burst into a roaring laughter as if he had just heard the most hysterical joke conceivable:  
“Whaaaat?! Oh come on, silly you!” Deadpool slipped out of the shadow and in the cage: “You really think I’d do this to my friend?! Ha ha! I mean, I might have roughed up a few people I know in the past, but this time I had nothing to do with this!”

Outraged by this nonsense, Clint wanted to protest, and, utterly confused, the newcomer stuttered incoherently. But the mercenary did not let them speak and pressed on with hilarity:

“That, on his leg? Oh yeah, that; a bear did it! It was just a bear, not me!”

The fright had the bearded man able to line up words again as he abruptly faced Deadpool and frantically exclaimed: “Oh my god! There are still *animals*?! The… y… you let… Animals are walking around and *attacking* people around here?! Oh god!”

The mercenary was chortling: “Of course not! But it would have been funnier in a way: no need for watch dogs when you have polar bears patrolling your backyard! And imagine if we could equip them with M134 Miniguns…”

 

By then Clint had snapped out of his stupor, quickly realising the younger man wasn’t an enemy but yet another victim of Deadpool’s madness. Only, he had no idea what the mercenary had in stock for the newcomer, and that posed a problem: was this another hostage? Was the mercenary going to torture or threaten the bearded one to get Clint to cooperate?   
After all, promises and coaxing didn’t do the trick so the bear enthusiast could be already using crueller means of persuasion…

Unconsciously pulling on his cuffs and pushing against the bars, the archer asked on a warning yet meaningful tone:  
“Deadpool, what are you doing?”

To what the mercenary answered:   
“Me? I’m just bringing you some help! I’m saving your life again; looks like I just keep doing that!”

 

“Please just… just let me go! I swear I won’t say anything, I don’t know any of you, I don’t want to be involved!” The bearded man started to beg, but Deadpool swiftly stepped forward and clasped his hand on his new captive’s mouth to muzzle him.

That made Clint’s blood boil, but he decided against snapping back too fast at the madman: there was a second life resting in the balance now; he had to refrain from antagonizing the nutjob as much as he truly desired to.  
Feeling ridiculously Captain America-like in tone and attitude, he tried reasoning with Deadpool:

“How is kidnapping someone else supposed to help me?”

“Why he is a doctor of course! He can treat you and make everything better! He might even give you a lollipop afterward as long as you are on your best behaviour…”

“A doctor?!” The archer wasn’t expecting this, his mind still set on the idea the mercenary was about to torture innocent people as main incentive.

Deadpool chuckled guiltily: “Okay, okay, you got me: he’s more of a veterinarian actually…”

The veterinarian struggled to speak against the hand clasped on his mouth, but his protests were unintelligible.

“You’re going to complain too? It works just fine in movies!” Deadpool moaned.

 

The bearded man fought again to voice his concerns and, with a sigh, the mercenary released his mouth only so the captive could finally object:  
“I’m only a veterinary *student*! I’m not even close to being a real veterinarian yet!”

“Then you should be thrilled, kiddo, and you should be way more grateful: this kind of field practice will only help you progress. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. Our Hawk-bear here bleeds for real, fights for real, and whimpers for real so it’s even closer to the real deal than working on regular dead meat, cold buffets, and deceased pets!” Deadpool reprimanded before slapping his hand back on the student’s mouth.

It was Clint’s turn to sigh:  
“This is a bad idea…. You know what? You should just let him go. And don’t worry about the guy: you scare the crap out of him: he’s not going to say or do anything, trust me.”

The archer truly wanted to strangle someone at the moment, but he had to play it strategically: in his predicament, he could only hope he’d manage to slowly but surely drill some sympathy and some sense –at least temporarily- into the kidnapper’s brain.  
A bit like placating a disturbed man during a high risk hostage situation.  
Negotiation and all.  
Professional stuff.

Deadpool’s laughter cut his reflections short:  
“Don’t be silly, you too; it’s not a competition! Besides, we can’t send him away just yet: our man the latté connoisseur, well he’s here to fix these nasty cuts of yours first.”

“What with?” Clint picked on: “He brought a whole hospital with him in his bag? Because that’s the only way to fix this. Those are not paper cuts. You have to let both of us go.”

That somehow vexed Deadpool:  
“Now you’re just being fussy: I’m sure you received way sloppier treatments during your merry little super spy missions; the working conditions here are probably much better than your usual coarse sandpits and creepy jungles! You’re S.H.I.E.L.D’s Jason Bourne, aren’t you? Well then start acting like one! You can deal with that just fine and the veterinary student will do just fine so don’t be such a baby!” 

 

Clint was insulted by the insinuation: “Of course I can deal with this! Only emergency patching up is just that: it’s for *emergencies*! Life and death situations; it’s meant to keep you going until you are out of danger and able to get under a real surgeon’s scalpel! I don’t see bullets flying about or hostiles rushing us and your murderous bear is out of the way…” he interrupted himself to let out a frustrated groan, realising he was letting the mercenary get at him once again:   
“You know what, I don’t have to justify myself! This is real life, not one of your telenovelas: you can’t just take a veterinarian…”

“Veterinary *student!*” The young man in question interjected barely comprehensibly from under Deadpool’s hand.

The archer kept on sternly: “Right, you can’t take a veterinary *student* in the street, force him to fix someone, and expect a miraculous recovery right on spot! I won’t be able to join your godforsaken clan if I end up having to get my leg amputated!”  
He scoffed before adding: “You don’t even have a first aid kit or anything, don’t you? It’s not like you’d have any use for one…”

Deadpool jumped on the occasion to lead the conversation where he wanted once again:  
“This is why I took the kid’s bag with me when I plucked him off the streets: this way we get access to his medical bag!... Or more like veterinarians’ version of the doctor’s bag…”

The student broke free to be heard again, this time more agitated than deadly afraid, pointing to the courier bag he was carrying:  
“What?! *This* bag?! This is so not my medical kit! This is only for carrying my textbooks and… and my tablet! I don’t even own a medical bag! Nobody does anymore!”

“Whaaat?! I’m being punk’d, right?!” Deadpool seemed unpleasantly surprised.

“No! I’m serious; I have nothing!”

“So this is just a man-purse? I gave you a ride in my super-duper truck all the way up here and all you think of bringing with you is a dumb *man-purse*?!”

“It’s not! It’s… It’s a *messenger bag*, not a purse…”

“Tomayto, tomahto!”

“It’s not a purse!”

 

However, before the pointless bout of absurd bickering stretched on, Clint interrupted dryly, feeling in no way patient or healthy enough to listen to more of it:  
“Alright, it doesn’t matter!” He turned a weary yet still piercing gaze on the mercenary: “Listen: this medical kit thing, it’s just another good reason to let us both out of this zoo. It’ll be better this way…”

But Deadpool was unyielding, and even eager to overcome this new obstacle:  
“Nonononono! We’ll improvise, that’s all! We can do without the kit; we don’t have to pay the big pharmaceutical companies for their licensed gizmos. We’ll be authentic. We’ll play it like MacGyver; this’ll work!”

Clint wasn’t giving up either:  
“Okay, what about this: you let us go, and I’ll join your Bear clan. You give me some time to recover; you leave the veterinarian dude alone, and then I promise I’ll stay a week with your gang… And if it’s as great as you make it to be, then maybe I’ll consider staying longer…”

“When it’s paid programming, they give you 30 days…” Deadpool pouted.

“Alright, alright, maybe a 30 days trial, but I can’t guarantee I won’t have to run away on Avengers or S.H.I.E.L.D errands from times to times… I don’t even know if they’ll let me join another group. Though: worst case scenario, I can be your on-call Hawk-Bear and spare the clan a few hours there and then…”   
Hawkeye was mostly lying like a dog at this point; anything to fuel his current hostage negotiation arguments: “But first you’ll have to untie us, let us out of here, and leave that poor guy alone.” 

“Meh! I don’t even know why you want to leave: I told you, we’ll find a way to fix your leg.” Deadpool sounded like a sulking spoiled brat:   
“Plus, if I let you go, you’ll run away, you’ll call your spy buddies on me, and you’ll hide!, You’ll hide and I’ll never see you ever again!” 

 

Offended yet perplexed enough to the point of almost completely ignoring a bout of dizziness, Clint bit the bait and objected after a short break:  
“I’m not going to *hide*! I don’t hide! ”

“You’re hard to find! Aside from the two previous times…”

“The two times you *stalked* me?”

“No. I don’t stalk; stop saying that…. As I was saying: aside from the two previous times, I always have a lot of trouble finding you!” The mercenary uselessly complained.

Momentarily forgetting his *no antagonizing the madman* rule, the archer snarked back: “How is-this my fault?! I’m either around the Tower, on assignments, or on assignments out of the country; I don’t hide, I simply do my job!”

“That’s right, and then you end up waaay too busy to spend some time hanging out with me! Everything is so much more important to you than me that you can’t even spare an hour or two!” The madman bitched at him like a manipulative elderly mother.

Nothing made sense in this criticism, which only pissed off the archer further.  
Barton was getting more and more tired of his whole ordeal. Deadpool seemed unable to do anything but to aggravate the injured man, as if the red-clad menace made it his new purpose in life.  
And he was doing miraculously well considering: the only thing that kept the archer from tearing a strip off the Canadian with all he had was in fact concerning what he had left. He was feeling exhausted already, as if he didn’t have the strength to jump headfirst into a pointless energy consuming shouting match.

And it wasn’t like insults or reproaches were efficient against the mercenary, nor were threats of any kind anyway. Even less when the agent was sitting on the cold ground, securely handcuffed and fairly incapacitated: you don't impose respect that way.

 

Barton still felt wrong, and it wasn’t only because of the soreness or throbbing coming from his various injuries.   
His head was spinning, he was nauseous again, he felt warm and cold at once, it all only grew worse, and he suspected it was more about the blood loss than the bear tranquiliser now.

The captive man could still stand it and keep it together, pretend he was moderately fine as always, but he frankly doubted he could do so for much longer. Maybe for a very few hours at best… two or one, if not less?

His condition could worsen rapidly for all he knew: he saw bigger and well trained men drop faster for shallower cuts than the ones he had suffered.

 

“We don’t hang out anymore…” A harsh whisper coming from the mercenary brought Clint back to the conversation; the madman sounding exactly like a prompter giving the next line to a comedian that forgot his text.

Was Deadpool doing this on purpose too? Whispering cues to others?

Riled, Clint could only snarl back with animosity:  
“We won’t be doing much hanging out if you let me bleed out in this *rotten* zoo! What do you expect from the guy you just keep getting half-killed?!”   
He motioned for his damaged leg and added: “And before you imply it again: I’m not just whining for the sake of it; to regular people, this shit is not a joke !”

But the tone and belligerence didn’t even faze Deadpool as he replied with a compassionate grin that could be heard through his voice alone:  
“That’s why you have to stop fretting or trying to get away. Just let us do our work and it will be just fine! As I said: we’ll improvise, and we’ll patch you up and fix you by our own means, right here, right now!”

 

Clint went quiet for a minute, unwilling to start the same inane debate all over again yet.  
He had more than his share of it for a lifetime.

 

“I was afraid he’d say that…” The archer finally mumbled half to himself.

He shut his eyes tightly in a mixture of dread and resignation, and he let the back of his head fall back against the bars of his cage.

The lazy part of his mind wondered why he was even bothering trying to reason a madman once again, then the same part strongly suggested he should just try to give in to the exhaustion.  
Another part ridiculed the idea of letting Deadpool win, butcher him and keep him as a pet if he survived, but that second part seriously questioned how the hell he was even supposed to get out of this mess in one piece anyhow.

One thing was sure: most of him agreed what was to follow would suck for him.  
Big time.

 

To be continued…


	3. Chapter 3

So it had been decided: an unstable killer for hire like Deadpool was about to serve as assistant while an unexperimented student was to somehow provide first aid to Clint Barton.  
If this had been an entirely different situation, say: if the whole situation had only been a movie he was watching while enjoying a beer or two, the archer would have been be curious an amused at the thought and at how ridiculous this all was.  
It was a vision out of a slapstick comedy show which Deadpool costumed as a bear would fuel with his gleeful eagerness, contrasting with the kidnapped hip student’s apprehension and hysterical fear. Even the costumes were parody material; only a notch above an acting club high school play. It was only a matter of time before they started slapping each other like the Three Stooges 

 

But there was no laugh track, and Clint felt absolutely nothing like laughing either: this was very real, and he was very about to be butchered by an incompetent and unprepared pair.

That was of course if he didn’t simply die before they could even accomplish anything: the agent was only getting more light-headed and tired as time went by, and he knew he couldn’t be left in such a sorry state forever.  
Maybe he was getting snappier as well: his hostage negotiations were going absolutely nowhere and he had enough of going by WWCAD –What Would Captain America Do. 

 

The archer had further argued with Deadpool on the matter of ditching the emergency aid and calling an ambulance instead, but he never did convince the other man. The student himself -soon to be field medic- had protested against what was asked of him yet again, but it didn’t work either.  
The mercenary had even debated with invisible people and inexistent voices on how his outdoor operating theatre could pose problems, but nothing seemed to postpone the incoming patching up of Clint’s mangled left leg.

 

Oddly excited as a kid on Christmas Eve, the Canadian had in fact snapped out of his not so internal argument only to start pressuring the veterinary student into taking action. He forced his latest victim to close in on Clint and to kneel beside the injured limb.  
This had the archer swear, scoot back, and try to fight his handcuffs and the rope that bound his ankles: not that he saw the student as a threat in himself, but rather since he knew the guy was about to serve as Deadpool’s Machiavellian tool.  
A bit like how one doesn’t mind a knife when it’s on the table, but hates it when a psycho murderer is wielding it…

 

The student, dazed and frightened, had neither the intention nor the capacity to take lead and order his “assistant” around as Deadpool wished –it apparently was supposed to be like the medical dramas on television- so the mercenary ended up making loud suggestions on how to proceed.

“See, that’s how I’m doing it: *jeez, wouldn’t it be great if we could somehow disinfect the wound first?!*… And that’s his cue; my buddy Doc-fancy-coffee-aficionado should soon remember how to do the surgery. That’s how Doc was reminded he had to cut the pant leg away first.” The madman explained out of nowhere as he winked at no one.

“A… are you talking to me?” the veterinary student stopped in his track as he was halfway through his work.

A pair of colourful and blunt scissors for kids held awkwardly in his tied hands, the student had been trying to cut off Clint’s fatigue pants above the ragged bleeding gashes while the archer looked on warily.

“No, not really. Although may-I suggest you finish this off and fast, doctor? The bandage still has to be taken off as well if you want to start the surgery… But that you knew it already didn’t you, *doctor*!” Deadpool answered, acting out his most intense ER melodrama nurse voice.

That elicited a groan out of Clint: “Could you just *not* do that!”  
He paused, hissed, and bit his lips as the student’s attempts pulled at his damaged flesh: “Or could we not do any of *this*?!”

“I’m so sorry!” The student whined.

“’It’s not your fault; it’s *his*, he’s just… GAAaah!” 

Clint had been about to insult Deadpool again when a blinding pain interrupted him and sent all of his body tensing in agony.

For the mercenary grew impatient and decided to speed the process up, giving a harsh tug on the fabric of Clint’s pants to rip it and expose his thigh and knee. Only, the bandage tied over the pant leg had not been entirely cut through yet and came away pulling at the wound.  
Punching straight on the ragged holes in the man’s limb would have been a lot more delicate.

His injury painfully jarred, the archer found himself hooked onto consciousness by the fiery agony alone and nothing else.

 

The student started to argue with his nurse, his voice squeaky and frantic, but Barton could not make out the words. The later had to shut his eyes tightly and call on his extensive training to finally manage to overcome the pain gnawing at him.  
He had worse but that didn’t mean this wasn’t a hell of a torture in any way, he couldn’t help but think. Getting shot once didn’t mean getting shot again was a walk in the park.  
The same probably applied to getting torn to pieces by a grizzly instead of getting shot.

He somehow imagined Natasha Romanova acting disappointed at how he could let himself be floored by the cuts. He mentally snapped back to imaginary Tasha that the cuts were more like fucking shredded muscles and that he was sure he saw a bit of bone earlier, but she didn’t seem convinced.  
He had to admit he did not get a good enough look at the injury, but he made sure Imaginary Tasha knew it wasn’t the point.

 

“Yikes! Still bleeding…” Deadpool noted after a moment, and this time the archer’s mind could make sense of what was being said.  
The dire implication pulled him out of his Black Widow daydream right away.

Not that he had expected the deep gashes to have somehow stop pouring blood, but a small part of him was kind of hoping for an improvement to this shitty situation. The archer risked a look, but quickly turned away from his shredded oozing wound; the sight of it alone seemingly increasing his light-headedness tenfold.  
It looked ugly, it felt bad, but it was hard to truly assess the damage with all of this blood staining everything. All he knew is that he wasn’t feeling as well as he was showing his abductor. 

 

“We have to disinfect the wound, doctor, remember? Else he might contract rabies and STDs from the beast!” Deadpool pressed on with over the top dramatic intensity.

“Disinfect with what?! I told you I don’t have anything to help!” The student complained.

The Canadian swiftly snatched the scissors from the man’s bound hands and pocketed them before replying:  
“I might have what we need…”

 

Pushing his tomahawk out of the way, he reached for another of his belt pouches and took out something he quickly exhibited to his audience of two: it was a small bottle of hard liquor, the minibar type. As his victims were processing this sight, Deadpool quickly explained:  
“Vodkaaa!! From my Russian bear cousins!... And: nope, still not done with the theme!”  
Faced with his victims’ lack of reaction, he pressed on and addressed the student: “You wanted something to disinfect the wound with, doctor: well there it is! Alcohol! Also something that works just fine in movies…”

With this, the mercenary grabbed the student’s wrists and slapped the mini bottle in his hands, then pushed the younger man closer to the injured one sitting tight against the bars.

A part of Clint wanted to complain and admonish the madman, but he realised the use of non-sterile bandages was the least of his worries: the claws of the bear were more problematic. After all, and that is something he learned from Thor who in turn learned it from BBC documentaries: bear claws were not like cat claws; they weren’t retractile, meaning they would constantly drag on the ground. Something that had Clint deduct his wounds were most likely packed with foul germs and all sort of crap thanks to the grizzly.  
In addition, his cut flesh was now exposed; which in turn meant whatever was crawling in this godforsaken abandoned zoo could now freely get into his injury.  
A cocktail of Salmonella and E.coli maybe? Would it really be so bad if even a very small number of these microbes were to be killed?

Not that he expected vodka to work as well as broad-spectrum antibiotics though…

“Doctor, what are you waiting for?” Deadpool spoke again.

“But… Really?! You… you want me to…”

“Come on, don’t be shy! See: your patient is waiting!”

On that, and that was something Clint feared from the moment a third player joined the sick game, Deadpool took a submachine gun from some sheath on his back and pointed the weapon at the student.  
A Beretta M12S the archer guessed by the look of it, but it truly wasn’t the time to appreciate the mercenary’s choice of firearm.

“*Deadpool!* There’s no need for that!” Barton barked between clenched teeth.

“Not my fault if your surgeon gets stage fright!” The madman answered. “I’m only giving him the courage he needs; I’m not going to shoot yet… not unless he wants me to…”

Nonetheless, his incentive worked wonders: without waiting for the end of this bout of arguing, the student hurriedly unscrew the cap of the small bottle and bent closer before pouring its clear content over the gashes in the agent’s leg.

 

And as it was to be expected, it did not feel great: the burn of the alcohol truthfully was something, to say the least. The archer had to clench his jaws until it hurt to keep himself from screaming, and tightly curl his fingers around the bars to refrain from digging his nails into his palms until they bled. His whole body was trembling from the efforts to ride the pain, and it seemed like forever before the fire in his wounds reduced to the previous sickening throbbing.

When he finally could breathe again, it was in a rapid panting that sounded too raspy for his liking. When he finally could focus on his surrounding again, he was a bit embarrassed as he realised he had an audience staring intently at him.  
The student was horrified and had taken a few steps back, it went without saying, but for a second –and even with a mask on- Deadpool almost seemed worried.  
The later had lowered his weapon and wasn’t aiming at anyone anymore; as if the scene had him forget about the whole hostage taking deal.

 

However Clint quickly assumed he was mistaken as the mercenary spoke again:  
“That vodka looked good. Too bad we don’t have caviar to go with it!... Although tacos and tequila would have been so much better now that I think of it.”

“Go fuck yourself…” The archer groaned irritably between clenched teeth, trying his best to control his breathing and nurse his pride.

“Is it the pain that’s making you cranky like that? You know, you’re probably right: we should do something about this. That would make things better for everybody!” Deadpool babbled on before pointing at the bearded man: “See how much you freaked him out squirming like you did? We can’t have out chief surgeon giving out on us now!”

Self-conscious, still off his game, the agent could only demonstrate his brilliant repartee as he grumbled:  
“Again: go fuck yourself.”

“We need the anaesthesiologist in here, doctor.” Deadpool was back to his ER drama role.

“The what?” Said the student.

“Yeah, should have known it was too much of a big word for you… Hum, the Guardian of the Good Stuff?... The chick with the syringes?... Anaesthetics… Painkillers of some sort?”

“Painkillers?! I… I don’t have painkillers! I told you already!”

“You said you had no medical equipment; that doesn’t exclude the possibility of you having painkillers…”

“But I still don’t have any!”

“Alright, no need to lose your cool now, doc… So no ketamine either? It’s for animals; veterinarians used ketamine on horses long before people decided to try it too…”

“I don’t have ketamine either!”

“Speeeecial K!”

“No! No Special K!”

“Not even *other* drugs?...”

The student now seemed offended: “No!... At least I don’t bring any when I go to classes! I wouldn’t want to be caught and kicked out!”

“Aw, you’re such a wussy... Alrighty then…What about you?”

Deadpool’s last question stayed unanswered, something that had Clint realise he somewhat zoned out a little as the others were bickering: the mercenary was now looking at him expectantly.  
He was also twirling his submachine gun around his trigger finger –thank god the safety was on- but mostly looking at the Avenger.

Ignoring a shiver that raked through him, the archer shifted slightly and cleared his throat: he was trying to win some time for his brain to catch up and recall what had been discussed the previous moment.  
Everything seemed distracting though, including a few non-corporeal dots that started dancing and flashing at the edge of his vision.

“Drugs. You probably have some left from your hospital stay.” The madman clarified at last as if he had read Clint’s mind.

“I’ve got nothing.” The archer replied, trying to sound as defiant as he could.

“Man; if you took all of your pills already at once, no wonder why you look like crap: you’re overdosing!”

“It’s not like that; I didn’t take any painkillers.” Clint felt like a drama queen for admitting so, but it was the truth nonetheless.

“You are stockpiling them? Like people do in insane asylums? Who are you planning on poisoning?”

“I didn’t even get my prescription in the first place: you’re happy now?!”

“Oh. So you don’t have them with you because you never had them at all...”

“That’s what I’ve been saying.” Clint hissed.

The mercenary seemed to ponder on that for a short while before scolding:  
“Then you are unbelievably irresponsible AND the worst patient I ever had! Don’t they tell you to take your pills as prescribed when they release you? Suffering can only slow down the healing process; everybody knows that!”

Since Clint didn’t even bother commenting and since the student was mute again, Deadpool kept on:  
“So nobody brought anything for this operation; I am truly disappointed. I expected better from both of you… And as if things were not bad enough already, we are out of tranq dart so there is frankly nothing we can do to sedate the poor man!”

“Whatever’s in your darts is making me sick like a dog anyway…” The archer grumbled.

He understandably remembered the violent bouts of nausea that plagued him earlier and still hit him at times ever since.

 

That memory however sent Clint on a different train of thoughts, which in turn elicited a weak derisive chuckle from him. A shit-eating grin stretching his features, he addressed Deadpool:  
“By the way, were you the one who took care of me when I was barfing while comatose?”

The mercenary seemed annoyed: “I wasn’t the only one so you know: one of my goons, Olson, well he was in the Navy. He had a lot of experience dealing with drunken brothers in arm spilling their guts all over the decks so he was of great help with your sad case…”

Clint only saw one thing in this vague confession: even knocked out cold, he had given a great deal of trouble to his captors. He could imagine Deadpool losing patience as his victim got sick, the mercenary forced to deal with the unappealing result. The agent had a clear mental image of the mercenary complaining about how his truck was now soiled while his thugs stoically watched on.  
It wasn’t much, but right now the idea of being a messy hostage and pissing Deadpool off felt amusing: it was a minor form of revenge after all; a small victory and he had to rub it in.

“So, anecdotes aside: not your proudest moment?” The Avenger asked smugly.

“Oh, hey: I see what you’re trying to do. It’s not gonna work!” The madman replied, waving his weapon in Clint’s direction: “Besides: I don’t think leaving your painkillers behind is *your* proudest moment either, bucko!”

“Aren’t you some sort of mind reader? You couldn’t just guess I didn’t have the pills?”

“Yeah I don’t expect you to understand, but when thought bubbles are floating way high, exactly like when they zoom out to show where the action is taking place; well the text ends up impossible to read from the ground. You’d have to be flying or have binoculars at the very moment to be able to follow whatever internal monologue is taking place…”

“When they zoom out.”

“You know: the establishing shot, to indicate location… they usually add a box saying *meanwhile* or something…”

 

This still made absolutely no sense for Barton, but he chuckled anyway hoping that his attitude would irk the mercenary further.  
However, he couldn’t keep on mocking the Canadian as long as he wanted to: his battered body didn’t agree with the whole laughing deal and another wave of dizziness overtook him, causing him to go very quiet and very suddenly.

Somebody apparently noticed the change right away:  
“Wow; you’re so *pale*… And sweaty… You could be a Polar-Hawk-Bear, as in Polar Bear! Because they’re white and would think this climate is too warm… hence the sheen of sweat…” Deadpool noted.

“It could be shock; he’s still bleeding…” The student timidly suggested.

“That would be *his* fault.” Clint replied, blinking the darkness away.  
His own voice sounded as if his head was held underwater and the tip on his fingers tingled.

“The grizzly’s fault technically…” Deadpool sighed before adding: “Then we’ll do just what I was trying to have doc do ever since I brought him here: we’ll suture these cuts off once for all.”

“Still not going to drop me in a hospital parking lot?” Clint drawled, yet he already knew the answer.

“We’re doing just fine, li’l’ cub. Come on now; lay down.” The mercenary answered, tapping the ground close to the archer with the toes of his boot.

“What?”

“Come on!”

Faced with Hawkeye’s lack of reaction at the command, Deadpool decided to take matters in his own hands. He simply tugged his submachine gun in his belt then crouched down to grab his captive’s uninjured leg. Without warning, the mercenary started pulling on the said leg and slightly drag the body attached to it in an attempt to lower Clint from his sitting position.

The result should have been expected: the movement could only painfully jar the archer’s injury. The man gasped at first as the sudden agony caused his blood pressure to further drop: his vision almost entirely went black on the spot.  
But quickly enough his self-preservation reflexes picked up: not unlike an injured and trapped animal seeing a threat coming its way, boiling with a visceral frenzy, the archer tensed squirmed and arched, fought against his handcuffs, and twisted in Deadpool’s grip. 

“DON’T TOUCH ME you SON OF A BITCH!!” Clint snarled, struggling hard to try and protect his wounded leg.

 

It must have been the surprise, or maybe the realisation he wasn’t doing any good, but Deadpool quickly let go of Hawkeye’s limb as if the touch had somehow burnt him. He remained with his hands slightly raised in a gesture of surrender, though Clint was too busy trying –and failing- to curl on his side in pain to notice.  
The archer was panting again, still all muscles tensed, his chin resting on his heaving chest but his complexion visibly growing paler anyhow. His injured leg twitched, sending yet another wave of pain through his body.  
It took all his might to not scream out loud, but he couldn’t hold a few grunts and angry curses.

 

It took him a moment to recover and dare lifting his head again. He instantly threw a murderous glance at his tormenter.

“What was that all about?!” Clint finally spat, still winded.

“I told you to move.” Deadpool shrugged, although keeping his distance.

“But why?! Why would you do this?”

“Well excuse me *Mister Delicate*, but you can’t stay sitting up like this when you’re missing twelve pints. You have to lie down so you blood stays in your vital organs! You’ll get into shock if you don’t… Plus it’ll be easier to work on your leg if the doc can get a good look at it; something that can’t be if you just stay hunched over like a hunchback vulture!” The mercenary snapped back.

 

The worst part was Deadpool actually made sense; the implication surprising Clint to the point an important part of his anger died down instantly. He should have thought of it on his own and acted upon it earlier.

 

“You should have warned me then…” The archer sounded bitchier than he intended to.

“I did.”

“It wasn’t clear enough!”

“Fine, you big baby: *you* do it then!”

“I don’t need you to tell me!” Hawkeye grumbled as he mentally readied himself for what would follow.

Miserably, his body stiff and his limbs feeling oddly uncoordinated now, the man painstakingly strained to slide down to the ground. With his hands tied, his leg fiercely aching, and his light-headedness, it turned out pulling himself to a sitting position was much easier than pushing his body until it laid back down.  
After a few exhausting and agonising minutes, Clint had merely dragged himself a few inches lower. 

“You’re gonna help him, doc? He doesn’t want me to…” Deadpool broke the awkward silence that previously engulfed them.

The veterinary student stammered nonsense and made no attempt to move, too overwhelmed with fear as he was.

The Canadian sighed and addressed the injured man: “You see? I’ll end up doing it all by myself; I knew it from the start!”

“Not like you did!... You can’t just yank at me like this: you tied both of my legs together, remember?... You pull on one and you end up pulling on the same other one you’re trying to save…” Clint replied, out of breath.

“I’ll be careful!” Deadpool interjected.

“I don’t believe you…”

“I’ll be careful I’m telling you! I had a pet hamster once, and I didn’t even kill him!... At least not by interacting with him…”

“*Seriously*?!”

“Do we have any other options, circus boy?”

“The hospital maybe?”

“Nah: *this* is the hospital from now on. And just stop with this already; it’s like you learnt a new word and keep forcing it in every sentence… You have to trust me. Plus you practically agreed to join my clan so I am honour bound to avoid *directly* killing you.”

“Great.” Clint hissed sarcastically.

“Now hush and let me do my paaart!” The mercenary singsonged.

 

And he concluded by starting to hum a tune while he moved toward the archer again. The humming turned into mumbling the lyrics of some rhythmic song as Deadpool firmly grabbed Clint’s belt as if it was the handle to some heavy luggage, to the injured one’s dismay.  
By the time the madman had his second hand gripping Hawkeye’s able knee in an attempt to stabilise the injured limb tied to it, the red-clad menace had already fully broken into the said song. “Pepito” by Los Machucambos, a choice probably influenced by the previous mention of tacos, and Deadpool was acting both the female and male voices with passion.

Before Clint could utter anything in his confusion, the mercenary carefully hauled up the archer’s backside and lower back by simply pulling on the man’s belt. Lifting Barton’s legs at the same time with the same caution, most of the man’s weight was off the ground, and Deadpool only had to take a step or two back with his load in hands before his victim was able to fully stretch. Then, the madman only had to slowly put the other back down and release his grip once he reached such point.  
Clint barely had to assist by using his own arms to support his upper body: he quickly found himself not sitting against the bars anymore, but rather laid on his back on the concrete once again.  
His arms were back to being stretched above his head –he was still handcuffed after all- only this time they weren’t as overextended as they were when he woke up in the cage, something which relieved some of the strain on his healing shoulder.

The shift in position had brought his share of discomfort for the injured man, but it had been remarkably swifter and less painful than what it could have been: Clint didn’t want to admit it, but Deadpool had in fact been careful.

 

The agent nonetheless found the experience a little bit peculiar, something which had him remain silent until the mercenary stood up again to happily conclude his little song. Deadpool manhandling him while singing about love and kissing in Spanish probably had a part in this feeling.  
The memories of stories he heard about the mercenary played their part too: rumour has it the Canadian had been stalking other well-known personas, and there were reports that Spider-Man had expressed concerns about Deadpool actively harassing him.

 

So maybe the mercenary had some sort of unhealthy obsession with heroes; maybe this creep never intended on releasing the Avenger and instead planned on keeping him chained in his zoo forever …

“This is just like *Misery*.” Clint reflected out loud, his tone an ambiguous mixture of amazement, disgust, and dread.

The observation seemed to amuse Deadpool:  
“So who’s the psycho nurse; the veterinary student or me?”

“I think we all know the answer… You’re disturbing, honestly.”

The way the mercenary started to chuckle at Clint’s admission did nothing to help his case.

 

With a sigh, the archer decided to spare his fatigued neck and core muscles and allowed the back of his head to rest on the damp concrete. He needed the break for a short moment and, although he hated the thought of taking his eyes off the madman, the idea of resting a little was too appealing to miss.  
His previous attempt at moving without aid had exhausted him way faster than it should have.

 

Facing up, with his captor out of his sight, Hawkeye could almost imagine he was stuck on a battlefield somewhere far away, damaged but with backup on its way. Maybe it was the blood loss, but this escapist scenario had a little something comforting to it.

However, he couldn’t entirely fool himself even if he truly wanted to: the bars of the cage were still visible above him.  
The sky was a bit different though: it wasn’t as blue anymore, and Clint knew the evening was coming sooner than later. The archer threw his head further back, trying to locate the sun so he could guess what time it was.

Though while doing so, his gaze set on one of the bars he was handcuffed to: his viewpoint slightly different after being moved around earlier on allowed a detail to catch his attention.

The vertical bar looked as solid as ever, but there was a defect where it was wielded to the horizontal one bolted to the concrete floor: rust had eaten through the soldering alloy, leaving as barely visible crack in the metal. Anybody would have missed it, but not Hawkeye. Not even with his vision still a tad blurry and darkened around the edges.  
This detail was something of great value to him at this very moment: it could be his way out of this decrepit zoo.

Now if only Deadpool could get lost for an hour or two and leave him alone and free to break out of there, Clint contemplated as he held back a triumphant smile.

 

Speaking of the Devil, the mercenary’s voice, shrill with indignation, brought the archer back to the current situation:  
“No suture kit?! No suture kit, no nothing?! What kind of medical student are you!”

“*Veterinary* student!” The younger man managed to sound even more hysterical as he replied.

 

Clint figured the two bozos had gotten into another fight while he was busy looking at the sky and his newfound escape route, but that didn’t faze him the least. He simply lifted his head high enough to be able to look at the other men.

“And yet still nothing to stitch our patient shut.” Deadpool bitched on.

The agent decided to join the conversation and, in accordance with his newly devised plan, almost innocently suggested: “You can go and get one; stores are not closed down for the night yet…”

Anything to get the madman away.

“Nah, I got everything I need with me anyhow; it’s just that I wanted him to *really* think about how much he sucks as a doctor… Plus my own kit might not be quite medical grade so I was kind of hoping we’d get something more appropriated to sew up bleeding flesh…” Deadpool waved dismissively, though not even sparing a look at his victim.

The news was kind of a disappointment for Barton; although it would have been too easy if the mercenary did leave him be so fast.  
The archer went from disappointment to another feeling entirely: his heart flipped in his chest when he saw Deadpool pulling out of another belt pouch a sewing needle and a spool of bright lime green thread.

“See, I thought of everything!” The madman beamed before shoving both objects in the student’s bound hands: “Now, doctor, about these sutures: show us your expert knot-tying!”

The student paled –though wasn’t nearly as ashen as Clint was- held the thread and needle far from him like they were toxic, and squeaked:  
“I can’t! I can’t! We haven’t learnt to just yet!”

“This again?! It’s easy; you don’t even have to know how to fix a tear in a pair of pants to do it! Just stick the needle in on one side of the nasty cut, then on the other, and lather, rise, and repeat!” Deadpool exclaimed.

His eyes wide and locked on the spool and needle, referring to how unsuitable the thread was for stitching work, Clint couldn’t help but be acerb:  
“You should have kidnapped a little old lady instead of this guy: she could have even knitted a scarf with the excess thread… I mean, seriously: is this fucking *wool*?! You can’t use that!”

“Oh I won’t.” The mercenary started, and then took his submachine gun out yet again to point it at the student: “He will.”

“Will you quit putting that gun to his face?!”

“Never! If you can’t have a gun you can’t have fun!”

But the student didn’t mind who was defending him or who was threatening him anymore: his entire body quaking, zombified with fear, he slowly kneeled beside Clint’s mangled leg as he started pulling the thread through the needle.  
Deadpool stopped the student for a short moment, but only to pour the content of another mini vodka bottle all over the sewing kit and the kid’s hands.

“Sterilising the equipment.” The mercenary explained to no one in particular.

Then with a pat in the back, he incited the student to get back to work.  
With shaking hands and sweat pearling on his brow from the anxiety, the bearded one started with the first stich of many. Deadpool guided him through the process by vocal commands and uninspiring remarks, but mostly put all of his weight on Clint’s shins to keep him from moving or kicking. 

As for the archer suffering through this, he wanted to jolt up and run away until his feet bled, or beat at anyone’s face until his knuckles broke. But he couldn’t: the mercenary was holding strong, and he didn’t have enough strength left to even thrash and fight the process; only enough to miserably try to hold muscle spasms at bay and control his breathing.  
The pain of having someone rummage into his wounds with very little finesse had quickly overwhelmed him, leaving him barely able to form any coherent thoughts. He shut his eyes tight, and even turned toward one of his arms to bite into his t-shirt sleeve: it was the shirt or biting half of his own tongue off anyway.  
He didn’t even want to think about the pitiful sounds he must have emitted.

The student stabbed with his needle and pulled on damaged flesh, shaky stitch after shaky stitch.  
To Hawkeye, it seemed like the eternity in Hell televangelists love to threaten with.

 

However, he was oddly grateful when the blood loss and the cruel throbbing pushed him so very close to losing consciousness that a number of the aches and sensations melted away, leaving pins and needles, numbness, and a much more bearable discomfort.

It took Clint a moment before he realised the stitching process had stopped.

 

Nearby, someone was shifting and voices could be heard again. 

Deadpool was still there, and he sounded part annoyed part worried by his tone alone:  
“Come on, doc! You’re only halfway through; you can’t quit just now and leave the needle hanging on the thread!”

“I can’t do this; I can’t do this anymore! This is… I… I have blood all over my hands; I’m going to be sick!” The student begged desperately. 

“No you’re not.”

“Yes! Please! Don’t make me do this; I can’t! This is way too crazy!”

 

As if he sensed things were too grave to black out just yet, Clint pushed the pain to the back of his mind with great difficulty, opened his eyes, and slowly turned his head so he could cautiously observe the other two men.  
It was all a bit blurry, but he could see the student was still kneeled beside him, his head low in defeat and his hands in fact bloodied. Deadpool stood behind stoically, the setting sun now coming at an angle casting strange shadows on his mask and his bear pelt cowl.

“This was supposed to be easy, you know? I grab you, you fix him fast, and we’re all good to go… But there we are.” The mercenary flatly told the student: “You’re making it very hard on me.” 

The younger man practically sobbed: “I’m sorry, but… I just… this is too sick. I can’t do this anymore…”

“Alright, I get it… But you have to understand that this means you overstayed your welcome here with us.”

Unsure about what the mercenary was driving at, Clint frowned and tried not slur his words too much as he asked:  
“You just changed your mind?”

“Hey, look who’s back!... Changed my mind? Yes, it’s a way to put it…”

 

The archer did not notice it before –might be related to how close to losing consciousness he remained- but the red-clad menace had retrieved his tomahawk from his tactical belt this time. The bear enthusiast remained very close behind the veterinary student. Moving slowly and solemnly, Deadpool placed both hands on the handle of the weapon, then started lifting it.

“Okay, doc; you stay where you are, don’t turn around, and keep your head low. It won’t be long I promise.”

 

The archer’s eyes went wide as the scene before him suddenly made sense in a wicked way.  
The student was kneeling on the ground; the mercenary was lifting a tomahawk above his head, and everything pointed to the fact this was to be a messy medieval-style execution.

 

“Wait! Deadpool, NO!! Back off! Don’t do it, don’t you dare do it!” The man rasped what was supposed to be orders barked with authority, although he probably had very little credibility being in such a sorry state.

At least it was enough to catch the other two men’s attention as they both gave him quizzical look. The student was probably simply confused as always, and Deadpool was probably puzzled as to what he had supposedly done wrong this time since he had trouble telling so without help.

Clint kept on: “Put the axe down; don’t do it.” paused, and then ordered on a low tone to the student still kneeling next to him: “You should move out of the way: very slowly, no sudden move… Try not to look at him...”

The bearded man started to shake again, but, although he seemed oblivious to the tomahawk still looming above him, he at least seemed to understand he was in danger and had to obey the injured one. So the student slowly got a leg under him and, his head low and his shoulders hunched, he cautiously stood up.

However, the mercenary was not going to let the student go: “Hey, no! Bad doctor! *Bad*! Stay down!”  
He exclaimed as he removed a hand from the handle of his axe and used it to push the youngest man back down.

“And you” Deadpool pressed on, pointing his tomahawk at Clint: “You don’t encourage him! He’s a witness, he saw everything: he can’t just go like that”

“What is this, a gangster movie?! He’s a witness only because you made him one!...”  
The archer interrupted his hoarse protests as his fuzzy brain caught up on the situation:  
“Besides: what is he going to say; he never saw your face and he doesn’t know your name!”

“Why he knows everything about the Bear Clan now: that’s too much intel to let go like this…” Deadpool shrugged before bringing his tomahawk back up above the student.

Clint was becoming part desperate, part irked: “You don’t have to kill him: he can still be useful! Just… Hell: just recruit him for your Bear Clan! He’s not going to tell on his own!”  
Clint was also becoming slightly unable to find any smart argument with the bloodloss affecting him and all: “He’ll be perfect: he physically looks like… a bear! A small black bear, you know the kind. None of your thugs are hairy: this guy here looks more the part than any of your actual clan members does!”

“…Yeah, maybe he looks like a small black bear, but a small USELESS black bear! He surely can’t be a tank like the others, and he’s not even a real healer: there’s nothing he can do!”

 

Heartened by how this farfetched idea showed a sliver of potential and catching a hint of an exploitable dorky reference in Deadpool’s answer, the archer tried his luck again with something even more dubious:  
“Well he doesn’t have to be a medic he can be… what, uh… A thief? Or a bard or something?”

 

Deadpool tilted his head on a side like an inquisitive puppy, apparently considering Clint’s suggestion. After a moment, the mercenary slapped the student’s shoulder to get his attention:  
“Hey, doc, do you play any instruments?”

The student was startled but obediently answered:  
“I… I used to play bass in high school…”

“That’s great! That *is* great! We can work with that! A bard!” Deadpool suddenly beamed and lowered his axe again, much to Clint’s and the student’s surprise: “And you know what we’re going to do? An audition!”

The mercenary grabbed the student by the upper arm and hauled him to his feet, and then promptly used the blade of his tomahawk to cut the rope tying his captive’s hands together.

The sight coupled with Deadpool’s lighter mood gave the Avenger hope this ordeal could end without any bloodshed after all.  
Although that is if he did not count his very own blood pooling under his leg: a muscle spasm and more shivers displeasingly reminded him that, even though the mercenary seemed less inclined to murder an innocent guy at the moment, he wasn’t out of the wood just yet.

“Audition? W… why? How?” The student stuttered as the mercenary was guiding him toward the metal door they came through earlier.

“We’ll get you a bass guitar, and you’ll show me what you can do! If you are any good, you get to be our official clan bard: we’ll have you sing tales of our glorious feats!... Or simply cover passable songs whenever our old radio dies on us… No Freebird though, we’ll make it a rule…”

“I don’t have…”

“Yes, I know: you don’t have a guitar either! Jeez, this is getting old!” Deadpool sighed, pushed the shorter man through the hatch in the concrete wall, and then added: “I think I saw a pawn shop on my way here: we’ll surely find you something to play with for sale. This audition is going to happen no matter what!”

 

With this, the mercenary and the student were gone.  
Just gone.

 

And Clint had been left behind.  
Alone at last although very perplexed his attempts at saving a life ended up helping his case much more than he would have expected. Hawkeye had in fact remained silent the moment he realised the mercenary seemed enthusiastic about his ridiculous suggestions, too afraid any additional word would have the madman change his mind again and decapitate the student or anything equally as crazy.  
There was still a nagging fear Deadpool would be nut enough to go through with the execution nonetheless, but this was something he couldn’t help anymore now that the masked one was too far to negotiate with.

 

Now Deadpool had found more exciting toys to play with, so Deadpool had forgotten him, along with the -until then- stubborn idea to have his wounds patched up.  
The archer had been abandoned, cuffed to bars, weakened, laid flat on the cold hard ground, and deep cuts unbandaged and unstitched left uncovered.

But somehow, Clint did not see the situation as dire. Instead, he focused on the weakness he had noticed on one of the bars earlier: the one that was half rusted through; his best chance to escape at the moment. Once free, he could get help from bigger badder heroes, have them rescue the student, have them throw Deadpool in any of their wacky supervillain jails, and then finally call it a day as he would be wheeled to surgery in an actual hospital.

But before that, he had to get free, of course.  
Don't sell the bear's skin before you've killed him as they say. A pun that had Clint groan the moment he realised he thought it.

 

More seriously, he had to act fast and escape soon. He had to dislodge the bottom of the said bar and slip off the one pair of handcuff locked to it. Then, it was only a matter of getting his second hand free, something that promised to be much easier if he could have at least the first hand to work with.

His first attempts involved pulling with all the strength of his arm, torso, and back. He then tried moving the bar around and shaking it, hoping it would help break off the remaining of the rusted soldered joint and dislodge the bar.  
However, even with the upper body strength of a master archer and skilled gymnast, the bar didn’t bulge enough for the process to be considered as promising as it first seemed.

Clint was fading, he knew it: he would have been able to rattle the bar way more if he wasn't so off his game, and he would have pulled much harder if he hadn’t been so light-headed and over all feeling like total crap.

He was unfortunately left with only one other option: he had to kick the damn bar. Kicks are stronger than simply pulling.  
…But still: kicking the damn bar while his injured leg was tightly tied to his good one meant he could not avoid jarring his wounded flesh this time.

Part of him wanted to whimper pitifully at the mere thought of how much this was going to hurt, and that slothful voice in his mind was again trying to convince him to give up and simply relax a little.  
The rest of him knew he could not possibly do that, but that one part had to admit avoiding using a mangled limb was way more tempting than forcing shredded flesh to move.  
To build his motivation back up, he had to conjure images of what would happen to his poor self if he gave in the temptation and simply stopped struggling.  
He imagined Tony at his funerals telling the few people there how ironic it was a birdbrain was to die in a giant birdcage. And he could see Natasha flatly recalling how he died giving up while Thor noted with disappointment there were unmanly dried tears on Clint’s cold dead cheeks. Banner would be irked realising he wasted so much time scolding the archer about taking it easy while recovering, and Cap’s kicked puppy look would be enough to make hardened criminals shed tears in sympathy.

And what about the student? Nobody deserved to be left with Deadpool, not even this guy. If he was to die in the cage, nobody would be there to make sure the younger man would be saved from their captor…

He’d led down so many people if he simply gave up, or so the archer thought as he carefully repositioned his body. He painfully dragged himself so to be at an angle that would allow him to kick at the metal bar. The simple act of bending his legs and bringing his knees closer to his chest made Clint see stars and break into sweat again.  
He was also reminded of his injured ribs, but he knew he would soon forget all about them in no time since far worse discomfort was to come.

 

He clenched his teeth, shut his eyes, held his breath, and swiftly projected both of his legs feet first against the cage with everything he had.  
Half-dead or not, his boots still connected with force and the bar gave a little.

Though the man could not hold a tortured scream as his whole injured limb vibrated with the blow and sent a wave of agony through him.

Still on his back, he could not help but squirm and try to curl in a ball as his mangled leg spasmed and twitched violently.  
He loudly grunted with rage and pain, tears of agony and frustration welling up in his eyes. He panted and threw his head back, he could barely see anything through the fog that shrouded him, and yet he was still slowly bringing his legs back for a second attempt.  
He had to keep kicking just a little longer, no matter how much it hurt.

 

Luckily, this second kick was sufficient: the rust cracked and the bar was pushed back far enough to release the handcuff that was secured on it. 

The Avenger didn’t have the luxury to wait as the pain floored him once again. He quickly brought his legs back to the ground while swearing and cursing the whole world almost frantically. In the same movement, Clint swiftly brought his freed hand from the side of the cage and desperately clutched the thigh of his injured leg with numb fingers.  
He expected to pass out at this very moment, but the cruel pain of his injuries was too much and suddenly sent a violent surge of nausea through him. 

Thus the second he was half unbound, the archer frenziedly curled on his side and miserably dry heaved.  
He heaved absolutely nothing for a short while until he collapsed back to the ground in complete exhaustion.

This time, as he lay curled and shivering uncontrollably, it took longer to recover and fight the void of unconsciousness creeping on him.  
His fingers were digging in the muscle above the claw marks in a vain attempt to distract himself from the throbbing. His pulse felt so frantic and loud in his ears he foolishly wondered if it would push his hearing aids out. The dizzy spells were getting frankly disorienting, but mostly threatened to have him retching again until he pulled a muscle.

It took a moment before a part of him stopped wishing he would just pass out for good.

 

The sun was lower in the sky and the air seemed chillier.  
Unless this was only the shock...

The ominous reminder helped Clint focus on escaping before it was too late to do so once again: he only had to worry about one pair of handcuff now. The ropes around his ankles would be easier to untie with both hands, and chances were the door out of the cage was not locked: when Deadpool left, there was no sound of a key being turned or a lock being pulled.

As he was about to conclude he had nothing useful to pick the lock with, he recalled the sewing needle the student had used to stitch half of his injuries: the damn thing was still dangling by its thread, hanging from his flesh where the bearded guy had abandoned his task.

The archer risked a peak, not daring to look straight at the oozing gashes in his leg fearing the sight of it alone would cause his body to drop his blood pressure in a self-preserving reflex. His vision was already blurred and greying as it was, and the dizziness was already bad…

He spotted the needle nonetheless, exactly where he guessed it had been left. He scrunched his nose as he noticed how the former neon green thread was now stained a nasty dark red from the blood.

 

Clint pushed himself into ignoring such gruesome details and started to stretch his freed hand toward the sewing needle, the handcuffs still secured to his wrist dragging on the concrete. 

But just as his numb fingers brushed against the much needed tool, the archer caught sight of a silhouette at the corner of his eyes.  
And before he could even react something suddenly crashed on his stretched forearm.

The archer jumped more in surprise than in pain, but immediately realised with horror this *something* was a boot; a boot that pressed against his freed arm and kept it from moving.

 

He knew whose boot it was and whose weight was pressing hard against his forearm and pinning him to the ground, but Barton nonetheless looked up to meet the other’s eyes.  
Or the other’s mask in this case since Deadpool was standing there oddly still, coldly stepping on the archer’s good limb.

“I know what you’re thinking: I’m home early, *honey*. Well it’s because our common friend the doctor out of a sudden remembered he could *also* play acoustic guitar. I happened to have one in my truck… not the one with the bear, the other one… Anyway: we didn't have to go to the pawn shop. The trial is already over and the judges agreed: turns out the doc is very good. He aced the audition; we’re keeping him.” The mercenary calmly explained.  
“Shoot! What am-I saying! It’s a bit awkward now that I think of it: telling you that, speaking of success and how the other guy got accepted in the Clan and all… *Considering how things are definitively not looking as good for you now*…”

Deadpool did not seem very pleased to see his captive trying to escape

 

“I thought you had forgotten about me.” The archer lied as a vain excuse for his attempt.

His breath was short and he sounded more exhausted than he would have wanted to; he gulped with difficulty as his mouth felt drier than the Sahara.  
He surely was not convincing anyone at the very moment.

“I didn’t. I was coming back. But maybe this was all a test. Maybe you didn’t pass…” Deadpool simply said.

 

And this time, Hawkeye had no idea what to reply.  
Maybe he did screw up after all.

Now he could only wonder what were the consequences for failing the Bear Clan admission test.

 

To be continued...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's Los Machucambos' Pepito: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQysX5mE3I4  
> Now imagine Deadpool singing it.
> 
> Thank you.


	4. Chapter 4

The situation wasn’t looking good: Deadpool the ever insane, snatcher of regular Joes and Avengers all the same, had just caught one of his latest victims in the middle of an escape attempt.  
Now if the costumed mercenary had just been in one of his benignly playful moods which usually involve at worst a punch or two in anyone’s face, perhaps being caught red-handed wouldn’t have landed Clint Barton in much trouble. But with the archer’s bad luck and Deadpool’s insanity coming together, two great game changing chaos-bringing forces, Clint felt his situation was much direr.

After all he was recovering from squashed ribs and a bum shoulder and elbow, a mild days old concussion topped with an unhealthy dose of an unidentified drug and, of course, a gnarly fresh bear claw wound threatening to pour very drop of blood his body contained on the cold hard ground beneath him. And this was all in great part due to the mercenary’s heroes and bears obsessions; two obsessions which only seemed to become more spine-chilling as it the archer caused more and more suffering.

Oh, and did he mention how the obsessed madman had chained him to a cage and tried playing field medic butcher moments before?  
Yeah, well that happened.

It was mostly how grave the situation appeared that made Clint fear the events to unfold next were going to be more wicked than a simple slap on the wrist for trying to escape; how serious Deadpool’s “crimes” seemed in his eyes and how it had the archer suppose the mercenary had finally snapped and become a full-time psycho killer.   
If this was all a big misunderstanding that led to incredible misfortunes, Barton wasn’t in an open state of mind enough to realise it.

 

So, cutting the chase; this looked bad and Clint was kind of concerned he was about to be executed right on the spot.  
Deadpool, a variety weapons very easily accessible, was standing above Clint, the later lying powerless at the first’s feet.   
The archer had an arm free, but Deadpool was pinning it to the ground and his other arm was still well secured anyway. He had pulled a cage bar partially lose, but it was still holding too fast to entirely break off and be used as a weapon by the time it would take the mercenary to reach for a gun and pull the trigger.  
Kicking the red-clad man was a possibility, but in Hawkeye’s state, it would hurt like a bitch. A torture that would in addition prove to be quite futile: even after kicking Deadpool in the nads or anywhere else, the archer would still be tied up, for one, and whatever damage he’d manage to cause would not last long with the madman’s healing abilities.  
In fact, with the blood the agent was losing and the nausea and the dizziness, it might even make matters worse as far as getting the hell away from the decrepit zoo was concerned.

 

Hawkeye swallowed; his throat unpleasantly dry.  
What other option did he have other than fighting, waiting?  
Maybe; maybe waiting for another opportunity was wiser… Or so he was trying to convince himself, wilfully ignoring the fact he might not have much time left with his more serious injuries left untreated.

On the other hand, if Deadpool was still in an executioner mood, the archer might have even less time before him: that made the issue more pressing than the medical one.  
Maybe distracting the mercenary from the killing could take care of the urgency. By asking questions about his damn Bear club perhaps: the whole gig had seemed to keep the red-clad lunatic ridiculously entranced…

And Clint had to admit: if he was to die right here at this very moment, he could at least find out what the hell this entire grizzly madness that had taken his life was all about.

“You’re supposed to be waaay snarkier and quirkier, you know?” Deadpool broke the silence with this recently developed psycho tone of his: “I’m about to give you your sentence for dishonourably crossing the Bear Clan, and I’m leaving you great occasions for squeezing in a few wisecracks, but you just keep getting paler and quieter. This is disappointing; you lost your touch!”

“I didn’t know… that would matter.” The archer answered; his breathing still shallow.

He didn’t dare moving a muscle, not even the limb Deadpool was still keeping pinned to the ground with his heavy boot.

“So what gives?” The mercenary picked up.

Clint blinked: “I was just… waiting?”

“Is that so? Waiting for what?”

“For your monologue maybe?... Like… the bad guys do in movies, before killing whoever they tried so hard to catch…” 

 

Hawkeye’s deception seemed to be doing the trick as, instead of chopping the archer’s head off, Deadpool answered with a hearty laughter:

“Alright I give you that, but I have no evil master plan to conquer the Earth or anything, so what do you want me to monologue about? I can give you Hamlet; or more like a personal interpretation of it. Or just any other subject more or less relevant: I can make do with anything!”

“This whole Bear clan thing?”

“Oh. Let me think about it. Well we’re a secret group with a cool theme…”

“I know, I got that.” Barton stopped to wait out a dizzy spell before keeping on: “I mean... How does it work?”

“Hum. We live in the wood, we wear costumes, we make bear puns, we have bear gadgets…”

Clint heaved a constricted sigh: “Not the theme. Why form that clan anyway? Does it do anything? What do you or any of your furry pals get out of this?”

“We’re a mercenary band. They all work for me in the end, but they get their share of the pay. I’m mostly micromanaging the team: I contact clients, I take the contracts, I give the boring ones to the less skilled members and I give the most exiting jobs to the best recruits. I got myself a guy to deal with the logistics and transportation even, and as the boss I take the biggest share and the coolest gear.” Deadpool smiled:   
“It’s a bit like a very crude pyramid scheme; and the Bear theme acts as a form of publicity, a brand name: people want the Beeears! The Bears get things done! That sends a mean image the clients like. We can have our very own logos once I find myself somebody to design it… And as a bonus, we get an excuse to fight off other clans!”

 

The archer went quiet once more, and not only because a cocktail of nausea, light-headedness and a deep shiver overtook him. In his haze, he nevertheless saw clear for the first time in the madman’s eccentric animalistic obsession, and he had to admit it sort of made sense in a way. Knowing of Deadpool’s prowess and how there were rich folks crazy enough to hire the guy, the whole cavemen-for-hire idea could work to some extent.  
…Until the self-appointed leader sabotaged everything out of boredom maybe, but in the meantime, Hawkeye had to admit the Avengers fought off more ridiculous criminal gangs on many occasions. Bears were far from the most ludicrous leitmotif thugs went for when creating their new criminal identities.

Another shiver racked through the archer’s body, this time painfully jarring his most injured limb. He could not help but tense and firmly shut his eyes, his arms reflexively pulling on the remaining cuff and the mercenary’s foot.  
Clint wondered if this was an early sign of a spreading infection, something that meant a hell of a fever could soon follow; as if he wasn’t bad enough already.

 

“Soooo… You’re done with all the questions now?” Deadpool piped in.

The archer tried not to open his eyes too wide in alarm: if he stopped distracting the mercenary, there would be nothing left to prevent the madman from going forward with his execution.  
Trying to act casual, he hanged onto just any idea that came to him and asked away:

“Not done yet… There are other clans after all? Which ones?”

“The Wolverines!”

“Didn’t you say that wasn’t a thing yet?”

“Bah! Worst case scenario I’ll help “Bub” recruit a few minions…”

This was getting dumber and tiresome, but Clint had to press on: “And weren’t they supposed to be your… *our* allies?”

“Yeah haha! Politic is complicated, right?”

“You’d know that…” Then, after a break, the archer dared asking for more: “Could you let go of my arm at least?”

“Nuh-uh, not yet. I don’t trust you: you’re sneaky.” The mercenary crossed his arms like a pouting brat.

This had Clint ponder on a related matter and curiosity had the better of him: “Why did you really need me anyway? Why go through all this trouble to get me?”

Deadpool shrugged: “So I could delegate the sniper missions and know it would be done more or less right. My other Bears are mostly big brutes, big guns or hand-to-hand combat experts: they lack the *finesse* for certain type of hits. I don’t want to start up refusing contracts already; that would be bad for business... Plus: I *could* do it myself just fine, but being the boss I can’t be doing all of the dirty work by myself, I’ll have a busy schedule…. And I don’t see how you’ll mind being my stand-in since you must be used to the boring B-grade jobs already: running with SHIELD, babysitting this one or this other aspiring superhero and all…”

 

This last comment pissed Clint off; it pissed him off the Canadian had the nerve to denigrate him so gratuitously as he was lying there, bleeding out only hours after being released from the hospital stay the very same madman induced. He was pissed the other went through absurd length to capture his poor self, only to discard him and spit on him the moment the mercenary had enough of these little games.  
Had the Avenger survived through so many unimaginable dangers and fought off so many formidable foes only to have his end coming in the hands of the worst head hunter on the face of Earth?  
Because “that would suck big time” would be an understatement…

 

Barton glared at the wacko: “You’re one to talk! Where were you the last few times the whole world was threatened? Is keeping demons or aliens from wiping major cities not paid well enough for you?”

But the archer’s vitriol was not even noticed, and Deadpool innocently –if not somewhat gladly- replied: “Last time a big bad megalomaniac tried to take over, I was in Macau for some organised crime related fiesta. ‘Couldn’t watch the news on time: I was briefly held captive after being chopped with axes then mashed by a grenade or two. It’s a long story if you must ask…”

 

Clint was exasperated. This seemed to be all in vain, his plans were frustrating and useless, and he couldn’t remember where he was going for in the first place anyhow.

“Ugh… Never mind…” The archer tiredly grunted, tearing his sight from his captor: “What now? Since I failed the Bear Band admission test, you’re gonna kill me?”

“We’ll think about it: we’ll have a meeting on the matter”

“Do I really have to stay all… tied up in here in the meantime?”

“That depends. Are-you willing to accept the Spirit of the Bear as your Lord and Saviour?”

“Don’t give me that, just… Don’t give me that; enough with the theme already!” Hawkeye rasped breathlessly.

 

The agent closed his eyes again and went silent, trying to collect himself.   
He was getting worse, he could feel it. The bleeding had been barely stopped by the student’s stitches, and he was feeling the full force of the adrenaline crash by now. He was starting to feel both cold and burning up at once. Adding to this the sun was nearly set, the air was getting colder already, and kicking with an injured leg had not been a good idea. 

“How can-I keep you from complaining so much? What is it you want?” Deadpool suddenly asked.

“What ‘I want? To be set free maybe?”

“We’ll think about it.”

“You always say that.”

“I might be the boss, but our gang have rules.” 

“Right.” Clint huffed.

“Come on; what else?”

“I want the bleeding to stop.”

“*Uuuugh*! This again?! You’ll be fine!”

The Avenger wouldn’t have admitted it normally, but he still snapped back: “I feel like shit, I’m not fine!”

“You had worse!”

“You think I don’t know that?!... But ‘t’s still not something your little mouth-to-mouth will bring me back from this time!” The archer retorted as he eyed his blood soaked leg eloquently. 

“Okay, I’ll do something about this, but you have to promise me you’ll stop whining; this is getting on my nerves, and bears don’t whine! Cowgirls don’t cry!”

“Do something as in: drop me in the hospital parking lot?”

“No dice. But we’ll take care of your cuts for real this time, and I’ll get you novelty bandaids when it’s all done! You even get to keep this one arm free!” Deadpool paused, then added: “The cuff stays on the other though… I think I lost the key.”

This had Clint breath out a grunt of frustration, weak but heavy with sarcasm: “*So kind of you*…”

“You’ll owe me one… Again.” Deadpool scolded.

The later slowly removed his boot from the archer’s forearm and rummaged through yet another belt pouch to get his hands on a third minibar bottle of Vodka.  
Seeing this, the agent sighed with exasperation and braced himself for the pain to come: the mercenary emptied the bottle on the wound once more.

Clint hissed. It stung and burned, but it wasn’t as bad as it has been.   
He didn’t know what that meant exactly.

“How m’ny of these do you have anyway?” The captive muttered.

“Plenty.”

 

Clint had nothing to add. The cage went quiet.   
The birds had stopped singing in the trees nearby now that the day was ending, yet the sound of a never ending procession of cars speeding on the highway could still be heard in the distance.

Clint shifted slightly and awkwardly: the mercenary was unmoving, apparently staring at him intently.  
The archer cleared his throat:  
“Now what?”

“Now you get to work! Stitch the night away!”

“Me?!”

“Yeah; you. You can reach the needle can’t you? You did it earlier when you tried to run away from your brother bear…”

 

Oh. So Deadpool wanted him to take on the veterinarian student’s job and work on his very own stitches. Not ideal, even less considering how crappy he felt; how his vision was swimming again, how he was starting to feel the cold seep into his bones, how moving his newly released arm was harder than it should have been…  
He however had to admit he would rather work on his own wound one-handed than let Deadpool do it himself or run off in search of another doctor to kidnap.

 

With a groan, Barton carefully reached for the needle still hanging from his wound and then painstakingly started with the grim task, under Deadpool’s watchful eyes.

 

It was atrocious, even more than when the panic-stricken student was giving it a try. Every stitch was a fight against the ache and the need to simply drop everything and put an end to this terrible trial.   
The task in itself was nearly impossible with such pitiful tools, a single free limb to work with, the fact his hand was shaking, and with his fingers numb and nearly useless.  
Time seemed to stretch indefinitely, and the stabbing pain would never abate.  
The man’s hand was unsteady as his body trembled. A sheen of sweat starting to cover his skin would cause the air of the evening to suck away faster what little yet precious heat was left in him.  
He had to shut the wound and reduce the bleeding, he’d hold onto these words like a mantra: he could not give up, no matter how things seemed futile, how his situation was absurd, and how torturing the task was.

God; the archer would have given anything to be done with this farce already!

 

“This is getting boring; talk to me or something!” The red-clad mercenary abruptly broke the tense atmosphere after a long moment.

Clint welcomed the distraction, even though he feared opening his mouth will lead him to retch like his life depended on it.

“Th’veterinarian” he slurred as he kept on trying to stitch himself up: “Did you really recruit him or… d’y’kill him after all?” 

That offended Deadpool: “Why would you think that!? I said he joined me! You think I’d lie to you about this?” 

 

The archer let out a weary chuckle in derision.  
His face felt on fire, but his fingers were stiff, and uncoordinated; as if he had remained for hours in freezing temperatures without warm gloves. He felt pins and needles in his good arm, and the needle was slippery with his own blood coating it. He had barely made a few more stitches; merely three quarter of the wound had been closed, in great part due to the student’s previous contribution.  
Mocking Deadpool seemed like the best he was able to do at the moment.

“Don’t you laugh! Don’t you give me that attitude, *young man*! I spared him, I mean it!” The mercenary objected.

“Then where is he? ‘You let‘im go?”

The sewing needle slipped out of Clint’s fingers.

Yet the mercenary didn’t notice: “No, of course not! I wouldn’t let him go like this, at least not right now! He has to be initiated first! I’m keeping him in what used to be some elk cage for the moment, like: with the guitar so he can practice more if he wants to. Not as cozy as our secret bear caves hidden all over town, but it’s better than forcing him to listen to your whining…   
My goons are watching over him and making requests, they’ll be best buds in no time: talk about a team-building exercise! As long as nobody starts playing Wonderwall or asking for Freebird of course…”

“’Right.” Clint simply breathed out.

As Deadpool was speaking, the injured man had let his head fall back on the ground and feebly stretched his free hand toward the needle he had dropped. It was still dangling on the thread as it did earlier, but somehow it now felt impossibly harder to catch than it had been.

The silence settled again on the abandoned zoo before the Avenger noticed the mercenary’s slightly blurred form kneeling by his side. Clint froze and stared with confusion, the mind, hazier by the minute, unsure of how it should make the body react to the proximity of this unusual enemy.  
Surprisingly, Deadpool’s hand slapped the archer’s own away and reached for the sewing needle.

Since the mercenary wasn’t saying anything, Hawkeye wanted to lift his head again and inquire about what the madman thought he was doing, but the effort seemed too much now; the vertigo and queasiness weren’t letting him move anytime soon.   
He hissed when some low-grade Vodka was once again poured all over his damaged leg, but he couldn’t find the right words to complain about the vicious burning sensation. 

The sting of the needle and the pain of his injury being jolted confirmed what Clint didn’t want to believe: the mercenary was taking over.  
The nutjob had realised his victim could not complete the task by himself in his sorry state, so the captor was doing the stitching for his captive.

Deadpool was helping. Deadpool was caring for him…  
Which was weird, or so Clint’s foggy mind decided.  
Nurse Deadpool.

 

Following this takeover, things started to become confused, and the man’s memories of the mercenary’s field surgery turned to a vague amalgam where time and events seemed to overlap or tangle.  
Clint would sink in and be pulled out of unconsciousness in cycles that felt completely random, although 2 elements would remain constant throughout: first the pain, and then Deadpool’s voice blabbering endlessly.  
The guy would not shut up for a second.

On a few occasions, when the throbbing would pull him brutally out of the darkness again, the archer would wonder if anybody joined them in the cage only to realise seconds after that the madman was simply arguing with himself out loud.

 

Only much later, feeling nothing disturbing his wound but the pull of the stitches and the background pain of cut flesh, the agent opened weary eyes to look for his red-clad nurse, only to find him still kneeling by, but struggling with something. Clint blinked until he could make sense of the scene: Deadpool was making a new compression bandage out of one of the archer’s spare t-shirts and the strap of his gym bag from earlier.  
Barton briefly felt amused his bear captor and associates took the time to bring the bag along while scooping him off the street, but the thoughts were quickly forgotten.

In fact, the mercenary went on to apply and tightly tie the said new makeshift bandage over the man’s wound, and the sudden blinding pain tore a raspy yelp from the Avenger. Out of a visceral reflex, Hawkeye feebly struggled under the mercenary’s hands, but he quickly froze as his nausea augmented tenfold.

“What now!” Deadpool mumbled at the sight of the look on Barton’s face.

Yet was barely heard because at this instant, his victim twisted on himself and pulled on his handcuff to face the concrete ground and miserably dry heave again.

“Gaaah, you little… You scared me half to death! I thought you were going to make a mess again! On my majestic bear pelt none the less!” Deadpool’s indignant voice came through the haze: “You’re very lucky you didn’t spew bile all over me; else I would have billed you for the dry cleaning!”

Coughing a little, chocking on his own saliva, Clint didn’t have the strength or the will to answer; he simply let the side of his face rest on the ground. He realised he must have been flushed for a little while now since the coolness of the concrete felt refreshing against his cheek.

“I have to admit you taught me something important today: big game tranq darts don’t work on people… especially if they’re filled with homemade-never-tested-before super sleep potion!” Deadpool kept on jabbering.

The mercenary started poking the archer’s shoulder.   
The later shut his eyes and simply grunted his annoyance: he was too busy being relieved the pain in his leg had finally died down a little.  
Perhaps also too much on the verge of passing out again as well…

“You want something to drink maybe? They give blood donors juice boxes to help with the loss of fluids: I know that; tried giving some in exchange of free food, but they didn’t want me in there and security kicked me out.”

 

Clint meant to snap back, or ask if the mercenary was done messing with him and what exactly he had planned for him now that he was done “treating” his injury.

However, before he could muster the strength to speak up, he heard the masked madman squeal in unmanly surprise and horror:

“What is that?! What do you… Is that what I think it is?!”   
Before Clint could move, Deadpool grabbed his head and pinned in against the ground, cheek pressed hard against the concrete. The mercenary started poking around the archer’s exposed ear, batting the man’s free hand away when he tried to fend off his captor.

“Oh no you didn’t!... You pulled that ruse? I can’t believe it!” The Canadian kept on fussing, tsking sporadically in disapproval.

“W… What?” Hawkeye, confused and a little bit alarmed now, managed to rasp.

“This. This right here. That little light. That thing is broadcasting.” The mercenary replied as he started tapping against his victim’s hearing aids.

Startled, Clint tried in vain to escape the masked one’s prying fingers: “Don’t touch that! Get off me!”

He only managed to scrape his cheek against the ground and exhaust himself to the point he felt his blood pressure drop even lower than he thought possible. 

Deadpool’s muffled voice barely reached him:  
“You’re telling me you didn’t even know? Uh. Well would you look at that… It’s clever though. Very clever… I mean: I checked your clothes for bugs and trackers, but I didn’t think of *that*!”

Still holding his captive on his flank, Deadpool started flicking Clint’s ear in a very displeasing manner before bringing his masked face closer and speaking up even louder:

“Hey! I know you are listening, Avengers! Whichever Avengers you are! I know you are spying on us! Hello? HELLOOOOOO!!”

On this, the mercenary released his victim’s head, chuckling.  
Immediately, as a last act of defiance, Clint tried his best to swing a vicious hook at the madman’s face with his able arm, but the punch fell pathetically short with so little coordination and strength behind it. Deadpool easily deflected it, and the archer only succeeded in jarring his injuries and ending up gasping for breath.

“Now now Boo-Boo Bear; they can’t see but they’ll hear you grunt, they’ll have all sort of kinky ideas!”

His limbs feeling like lead, Clint warily rolled on his back; too drained to even comment on the mercenary’s insanities and delusions.   
This allowed Deadpool to keep on:

“Maybe things are better this way after all. You’re like that senile old cat, riddled with arthritis, walking into waaalls, barely able to move anymore and yet stuck with a ton more years ahead of it because cats are all little stubborn bastards. There’s just so much meds I can buy and shove down your throat, so many messes I can clean up, and so many treatments I can afford. So, hey; if anybody comes forward and offers me to take you off my hands, it *is* better than driving you to the vet and having you put to sleep forever. Better passed down to someone else than dead, right? I couldn’t have done much more in the long run, so it’s the best for everyone in a way…  
You have absolutely no idea what I’m trying to say, don’t you? Alright, it doesn’t matter… Then let me tell you this: bye bye, Brother Bear. I’ll be seeing you again when you’ll be less dead-ish!”

Clint’s utter confusion did not last long as unconsciousness finally claimed him, the sight of the mercenary grandly draped in a bear rug fading to black.

 

*****************

So he wasn’t quite dead yet.  
Or perhaps he was, and that female voice he could nebulously hear meant St-Paul standing before the Pearly Gates of Heaven had somehow decided to become St-Paulette instead.

Something was pulling at his mind, bringing him out of the darkness.  
The voice – like Brigitte Bardot but with a more subtle accent- seemed to be calling him.

It sounded strange at first, until his addled mind deciphered enough syllables to recognize he was not being called by his first name or his codename:

“Agent Barton? I need you to stay with me…”   
He briefly understood but couldn’t make out the rest.   
He didn’t know the voice.

His consciousness was seemingly like waves on the beach: rolling in, pitching forward, breaking, only to then slowly slip away.

He did not want to open his eyes: it seemed like, lately, waking up had only thrown him into more and more trouble every time.  
He was in pain. He could not keep himself from shivering and that only made him hurt more.

He could hear and feel on the ground someone approaching at a fast pace, and he went as far as praying this wasn’t Deadpool coming back just yet.  
Although the newcomer then spoke with the woman and Clint knew this one deep voice he could distinguish now:

“Rogers?” the archer slurred.

“I’m here Barton. Just hang on and listen to the medic here; we’ll get you to safety in no time.”

It really was the Captain. Clint was being rescued.  
Even if it might have normally stabbed at his ego to be the damsel in distress, Hawkeye felt an incredible wave of relief wash over him… So much he nearly forgot all about having to cling unto consciousness and had to be coaxed into focussing on staying awake once again.  
On the woman medic’s requests, he’d meekly nod to prove he was still with them, opened heavy lids and followed fingers the best he could, obediently let her take his pulse, and tried answering any of her questions.   
It was all blurry though; staying somewhat alert was considerably hard, and he often couldn’t remember for the love of God what was asked of him, or what was it he answered.   
For example, at some point he felt very compelled to tell her the concussion was a few days old and not to worry about, but he wasn’t quite sure she even understood what he meant. It was only later during her examinations that he reflected out loud the thing could explain part of the symptoms –headache, dizziness, and nausea- he attributed to bloodloss and Deadpool’s bear tranquilizer, but he had the impression the medic didn’t completely believed his self-diagnosis.

It did not matter if he was making sense or not though: he was being rescued.   
Whoever it was that was endlessly asking him to keep his eyes open, whichever side she was on, she was there under Steve’s supervision: it clearly told the archer things were going to be alright.

 

Something pressed against his sewn-up wound, jolting the archer awake with a sharp cry of pain.  
He had dozed off again, but the reawaken throbbing was sure to give him a few additional seconds clear of the darkness that was claiming him still.   
There were hands on his injured legs. Some untying the ropes that were digging into the skin of his ankles, others touching the badly stitched gashes on his limb. Clint hissed again, but he didn’t have the strength to do more than look away, clench his jaws, and swallow compulsively.

The touching stopped. Rogers and the woman were now exchanging words, and their voices, low and careful, sounded somewhat serious.

“Cap?” Clint’s voice was barely above a whisper.

Steve’s blurred form appeared in his greying field of vision, crouching by his side to be at his level:

“I haven’t left, Barton. Hold still while I break these off.” The Captain said on a comforting tone.

He reached for the archer’s hand still secured to the cage and easily broke the chains of the handcuffs without even roughing up the injured man in the process. Carefully, the Super Soldier rotated Clint’s recently freed arm to gently bring it down against the archer’s chest. Mechanically, the later braced the healing limb with his able one, only now realising he there wasn’t much sensation left in his fingers.  
A leather coat still warm from being worn was laid over his upper body, providing much needed heath to Hawkeye’s pale and shivering form. He had Cap to thank for this relief.

 

Just then the hands were back on Barton’s wounds, but Rogers, like a paediatrician would do before vaccinating a small child, decided on talking to the archer to distract him from the pain:

“It’s alright; Doc here will be taking care of you. We should be able to airlift you to a medical center in no time. Until then, try to stay awake for me: I know you can do this.”

“Yeah… ‘Can do that…” Clint slurred.

He first blinked and then started staring at the sky the hardest he could to fight the pull of sleep and the ache in his leg. It was dark out now; the moon was shining with a gentle glow on the bars of the cage.

“In the meantime, you want to know how we found you?” Steve said; his presence and tone still kind and soothing.

Clint suddenly felt guilty at the realisation people were probably worried about him all along, the Captain even more so. He felt bad for lying to the All-American hero –his very friend- and for his own impatience and crappy decisions.

Yet he did not want to think of it in his current state; not until he could come up with a way to make up for it, or not until he could at least be able to form coherent thoughts and speak clearly enough to express himself. The man had as a personal rule to avoid dealing with various feelings of the kind under the influence of painkiller or, in this case, shock. Not that he never ever spoke too fast or said something he would regret right away, but things were different with this kind of subject.  
He knew Steve would understand: Hell, the blond wasn’t even reprimanding him for being an obstinate treacherous bastard yet!  
Maybe being half-dead had its perks after all…

Thus Clint considered Steve’s offer: welcoming the distraction and curiosity getting the best of him, Hawkeye nodded in agreement.   
Patiently, the Captain went on to explain.

 

The archer’s mind was still foggy, his ears rang; and he’d get distracted when the medic would prod his injuries or interrupt to start an IV line on his arm; factors causing him to miss bits and pieces of the Captain’s tale. The man nevertheless succeeded to grasp the basics on how the events unfolded while he was Deadpool’s new chew toy, and how on Earth the cavalry managed to find him in the middle of nowhere.

Essentially, Steve’s urgent mission ended sooner than expected, which left enough time for the man to feel the need to check on the archer as the evening set in. Steve had called Pepper to inquire about Clint, Pepper informed him back of her delay and the change of plan, and both concluded they had been played by the sneaky agent. Steve had called the Tower but only Jarvis answered: following a swift scan, the A.I. notified him Barton had not arrived yet nor even called to check in.  
The Super Soldier’s concern obviously grew then, and the task of finding the archer had begun the moment Steve jumped on a Quinjet flight back home. At some point, Jarvis briefed the Captain on the latest upgrade Stark added to Clint’s hearing aids: the billionaire had clandestinely installed a microphone and a tracker in one of these damn things, with the possibility of remotely activating them in time of emergency.  
Since Hawkeye would often go missing and all, Steve explained with a sorry smile…   
Clint grunted in embarrassment at this part of the Captain’s retelling.

Although the Captain strongly disapproved of the whole idea of planting secret bugs on their very own kind, the A.I. convinced him of the immediate utility of both pieces of technology. With Cap’s reluctant agreement, Jarvis activated the tracker and microphone, and both could listen in on the crazy scenes Deadpool had been making just then. Most of all, they could pinpoint Clint’s location somewhere in New-Jersey, an abandoned location near the highway.   
Cap got on his way; SHIELD was called for reinforcement and medical assistance just in case.  
The rest of the story was fairly easy to deduct, even for the archer on the verge of passing out.

The explanation also clarified why Deadpool had apparently lost his marbles at the mere sight of his hearing aids earlier on: the mercenary must had noticed something was going on with those things. Part of the madman’s last rant made sense: he knew he had been made and he knew Clint’s buddies were about to barge in to rescue the man.   
And the bear enthusiast had deliberately left his prey behind in the cage knowing very well the Avengers or associates would come over and take care of the injured one for him.

 

“S’where’s Deadpool now?” Hawkeye asked all of a sudden.

“We think he barricaded himself in the main building with his men. I haven’t received any update on the situation yet.” Steve paused, then added: “You’ll probably be glad to know we found a civilian locked with a guitar in the *elk cage*. He’s safe now; no need to worry about him anymore… He managed to face Deadpool and leave unscathed; you have a lot to be thanked for.” Steve replied with a smile.

Indeed relieved but feeling humble on the matter, Clint willingly ignored the Captain’s approval and went on joking instead:

“H’wasn’t a good medic though… none of ‘em were... They mess’d up.”

“I can see that, but it will be much better this time: our medic Doctor Martin is one of the best.”

As if on cue, the woman’s blurred form came closer and spoke to the Captain:  
“He’s lost a lot of blood and we have to move him fast; but there seems to be a problem with transport. They can’t rappel down with the stretcher and it might take some time to find somewhere to land…”

“It’s better not to wait.” Steve reassured on his ever effective level tone: “I can take care of that, I’ll carry him. Give me the location and I’ll meet them there with agent Barton.”

The two discussed a little more, but Clint zoned out for a few minutes.   
He came to in pain only to find the woman putting a new dressing on his injuries, yet Steve’s hand on his good shoulder took part of his mind off the unnerving feeling of fingers on his abused flesh.

“Hold on.” Cap said as he gently helped Clint in a sitting position and supported him there.

“Tony sucks… He can’t… he has no right t’put mikes on me without tellin’me…” The archer suddenly declared, sounding almost drunkenly revolted.

“I know, I would have told him so at the time if I had been aware of it.” Steve wasn’t fazed by the sudden change of subject and his tone was apologetic and sincere.

The Captain readjusted his coat on Clint’s shoulders so it wouldn’t fall. The later was almost entirely limp and having trouble even holding his head up.

“S’okay; ‘not your fault” He breathed.

 

In his haze, the archer felt Steve bracing him and, next thing he knew he found himself being lifted off the ground only to be held against his friend’s chest as if he weighted nothing.  
He was going to be carried alright.

“I’ll have a talk with Stark about that the moment he comes back, but somehow I guess he will use today’s events to justify his actions.” There was a sliver of annoyance in Steve’s voice.

The medic came forward and exchanged a few more words with the Captain. In the meantime, Clint was busy trying to hide how much he was shivering and how the other man’s body heat seeping through their respective clothes was making it better.

He always found it weird to be carried by Cap: it wasn’t like being in Hulk’s arms; Rogers wasn’t as many times his size in muscles so sometimes it was easy to forget the man had superhuman strength. That often had Clint feeling like he should hop down and help carry a part of his own weight instead of letting a man smaller than the Jolly Green Giant do all the work.

 

“Clint? Are you still with me?” Steve’s voice came through the fog in the archer’s mind.

Hawkeye’s head perked up; they were moving already, at a fast pace. The Captain had carried him out of the cage by the time Clint was brought back to consciousness and was now jogging in the overgrown gravel paths of the abandoned zoo.   
The Super Soldier would carefully dampen his landings after each step so the injured man wouldn’t be bounced up and down in his arms.

“Yeah, still here… ‘Can’t believe ‘m helping Stark be right… ‘T’s… I feel *violat’d*…” Barton mumbled, his tired mind still stuck on the conversation they had minutes ago.

This made Steve laugh: “Knowing you, you’ll use how he helped land you into trouble in the first place as a comeback.”

Clint smiled: he knew he was going to bring this and try guilt-tripping the billionaire.

“D’you think Tony hir’d Deadpool to… torment me?” He said after a pause.

This had Steve laugh again.

 

Clint could distinctively hear a Quinjet hovering nearby over the sound of his friend’s boots on the gravel. There were voices; people coming to assist.  
The archer had shut his eyes again, too exhausted to fight the pull of sleep this time, too solaced by the Captain’s warmth.  
His thoughts wandered and he pondered on getting his revenge on Stark, and then he started to somewhat consider hiring the Bear Clan to do it for him.  
They were somehow linked now, weren’t they?

On such last fleeting ideas, but knowing at least he was surely in very good hands now, Clint Barton passed out in the Captain’s arms.

 

The End


End file.
